When Oracle corporation first approached Acorn computers to put together a reference design for their new Network Computer concept, they decided that it should be able to access as much of the multimedia content on the Internet as possible. To this end, Acorn came to us to license MovieFS our system for allowing a wide range of different multimedia formats to be played back under their Replay system.
As a result of our work on MovieFS and related projects we own the rights to ARM code implementations of a wide range of the most common audio and video decoders around today. These decoders are not tied tightly to any one operating system and can easily be converted to run in almost any environment.
Subsequent versions of the NC needed a RealAudio client, and we were asked to produce one. Despite the limited power of the first generation NCs (based on ARM 7500FE chips) and the complexity of the RealAudio codecs we produced a system that seamlessly played RealAudio files both from local storage and from streaming across the net.
Our latest project has been working on an H263 based video phone. Starting from the Telenor H263 coder/decoder source code we have optimised it drastically, resulting in an implementation with almost all the processing done in hand optimised ARM code. Running the encoder on a StrongARM RISC PC now manages more than twice the number of pixels per second as a Pentium at the same clock speed.
We now have a fully functional videophone capable of transmitting/receiving sound and video at a wide range of sizes/qualities across bandwidths varying from modem to ethernet.
The most recent thrust of this work has been to make the VideoPhone comply with the appropriate international standards (H323, G723.1, H245 etc) and thus to allow interaction with videophones on other platforms. We are now capable of communicating with other H323 standard videophones (such as VDOPhone and Intels 'Connect and Share').
We have also been working on optimised ARM code implementations of MPEG audio and video codecs for ARM machines. More info soon!