Over the last year and a half, I’ve been working on the spare time between projects on my own OpenMAX IL implementation for Linux. I started it because I really enjoyed implementing OpenMAX IL on Symbian OS during my days as a developer in the Multimedia Team of Symbian and Nokia. Since I no longer was at Nokia and the Symbian platform was effectively defunct, I had no practical means of working with OpenMAX (well, at least not in the way I was used to, which is, using with my own code base).
At the same time, I wanted to update my Linux system programming skills, after 4+ years working almost exclusively on Symbian. Having started in systems programming with Slackware Linux 3.4 at university around 1997, after 4 years of exclusive Symbian OS work, I was already missing Linux.
Anyhow, at the time when I started this new OpenMAX IL implementation, there were already two fine Open Source implementations for Linux, Bellagio OpenMAX IL and LIM, so as usual, there really was no need for another one. However, I as I mentioned, I wanted to experiment with my own code base. So here it is. I’ve finally managed to put some time together over the Christmas period to tidy up the code and share it.
Comparing this new code base with the implementation that I did for Symbian, this is a complete redesign, with a new threading model and internal architecture. And obviously, there is no Symbian C++ anymore, this is written in C. It shares though the object-orientation approach of the base component infrastructure, but with a completely different API.
Initially, Tizonia OpenMAX IL was based on IL version 1.1.2, which was the latest version of the spec at the time. But once Khronos made public its 1.2 provisional specification, I decided to migrate the code base to it. Still this is not yet a complete implementation of the 1.2 provisional spec; I soon plan to document the status of the implementation either in this blog or in the project website.
The code is hosted on GitHub with repos mirrored on Bitbucket and the project’s website is reachable from http://tizonia.org
There is still a ton of quality work to be done plus a number of critical APIs that are missing in the base framework, so there is still no date for the first “official” release. However, functionality wise, with Base and tunnelled communication working decently, I believe there is enough already to make it worth sharing.
I hope people can find Tizonia a useful platform to experiment with and try the new OpenMAX IL 1.2 features that Khronos anticipated in the provisional specification. At least, I had some good fun myself while working on it.