Video Features with the Mobile Video & Audio SDK

With more and more video enabled handsets appearing on the market today, developers need a robust and powerful set of tools to help them deliver their content to the end user. The Mobile Video & Audio SDK integrates with the MercuryXMS MMS SDK to provide comprehensive and flexibility with a set of tools to encode video for mobile phones and deliver that video in a variety of formats.

The Mobile Video & Audio SDK supports the creation of 3GPP compliant video files, using either H.263 or MPEG-4 encoding. (busineSMS.com Software is licensed to create and sell MPEG-4 encoding tools.) Developers can covert any DirectX® compatible video stream to a format suitable for delivery and viewing on most video enabled handsets today. For example, you can convert AVI, ASF, WMV and MPEG files to 3GP format quickly and easily using the Mobile Video & Audio SDK.

Developers have fine control over the conversion process. The target video height and width can be specified, as well as frame rate, video bit rate and key frame period. Audio tracks are converted to AMR format with a user defined audio bit rate also. When encoding a video file, either the video or audio track can be optionally extracted - for example, you can encode a video file without the audio. CBR (Constant Bit Rate) control is supported.

The Mobile Video & Audio SDK includes a sophisticated frame grabber module that allows you to extract frames at user defined time periods (accurate to hundredths of a second) and store those frames to disk. These frames can then be send as MMS picture messages, converted to animated GIF or sent using SMIL to provide a running slide show. Frames can be saved to JPG format with a user defined level of quality (0 - 100%) to reduce image size. For example, you can extract frames at 1, 2, 2.2, 2,5, 4 and 6 seconds into the video sequence.

The start time and duration value of the clip can also be specified. This allows short previews or portions of large video files to easily be extracted and sent as short video clips.

Mobile video can be visually watermarked using the Mobile Video & Audio SDK's powerful image overlay engine. BMP, GIF or JPG images can be watermarked at any X, Y location on the video to provide powerful and strong branding of all video content sent to the phone.

Text overlay is supported as well, together with customized time points so you can specify text to be drawn onto the video sequence, with a user defined font and size, as well as font formatting such as underline, bold and italic. Text forecolor and backcolor can also be defined, as well as a customized level of transparency.

To permanently brand your content, the copyright message of a video file can be specified.

The MercuryXMS MMS SDK supports forward locking of video with support for Nokia and OMA forward lock, and SonyEricsson content protection. This allows you to protect the content you send with DRM capabilities so that the target user cannot forward the content to another handset. Video can also be digitally watermarked with a user defined byte array representing your own custom fingerprint for the video clip. This data can be written to or read from the 3GPP file you create.