Video Features of 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 MercuryXMS 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 MercuryXMS Mobile Video & Audio SDK supports the creation of 3GPP compliant video files, using either H.263 or MPEG-4 encoding. Developers can convert 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 3GPP format quickly and easily using the SDK.

Click here to view a sample AVI file (1.7Mb)

Click here to see the converted video in 3GPP format (68kb)
(Requires a 3GPP player such as Quicktime)

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. 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 SDK provides 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 MercuryXMS 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.

Smooth 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.

The copyright message of a video file can be specified as well to permanently brand your content.

Streaming ready and progressive download compatible video clips can also be created. By hosting streaming ready clips on your streaming server, your target mobile phones can watch video streaming over GPRS, bypassing the MMS message limit for long video clips.

The MercuryXMS MMS SDK also 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.