Multimedia for Linux

Awesome multimedia technology heads for KDE
Multimedia seems to be the new driving force behind the computer hardware market. And it’s not just for Windows anymore.

Phonon, an advanced multimedia architecture due in KDE 4.0, will be demonstrated at LinuxTag, May 3-6, in Wiesbaden, Germany. The Phonon architecture supports NMM (network-integrated multimedia middleware), enabling such capabilities as delivering synchronized audio and video presentations across networked systems, controlled by a single, central application.

Phonon comprises a central hardware configuration database said to free multimedia applications from the need to configure hardware. This simplifies multimedia application development, according to the Phonon homepage. Additionally, Phonon will support NMM, an advanced multimedia middleware framework that, in itself, could bring a lot of new functionality to PCs and devices of all kinds.

With NMM, multimedia content is readily shared among networked devices and even “handed over” from one device to another. One example is media playback, a task that can be handed over from a mobile MP3 player to a hi-fi system in a living room, for example, as a person approaches and then enters their home. As far as NMM is concerned, the devices on a network are all virtual devices, such that “a commodity mobile phone can become a radio receiver or the same video recording can be displayed on three TV sets simultaneously,” Lohse explained last year.

Other potential NMM applications include networked multimedia home entertainment systems, distributed and parallel media processing applications, distributed streaming servers and services, communication and control systems, large-scale multimedia installations such as video walls, and DRM (digital rights management), according to Motama.

NMM supports a host of network transports and operating systems, and aims to make inter-system and inter-application media distribution transparent to developers, simplifying the creation of applications that, for example, distribute TV to multiple output devices. NMM works by moving multimedia applications away from their traditional client-server architecture, toward a more distributed middleware approach.

In the example of an application that distributes TV to multiple displays, the distributed architecture enables multiple systems to be transparently controlled from a single device. Or, output can be “handed off” from one display device to another. Yet another application might be performing resource-intensive transcoding on a PC, for display on a PDA.

NMM is available now for download, either standalone or on a Knoppix-based live CD, from the NMM project homepage. More details about Motama’s commercial NMM services can be found on its homepage, here. More about Phonon can be found at KDE.org, here.

[tags]linux,multimedia,nmm applications,virtual devices,tv sets[/tags]