Ultimedia Services for AIX, Ultimedia Audio Adapter and Ultimedia Video I/O Adapter

Explore the POWER of multimedia on the RISC System/6000

Contents

• Highlights
• Multimedia -- At your service
• Ultimedia for AIX
• Features and Benefits
• Ultimedia Audio adapter technical information
• Ultimedia Video I/O adapter technical information

Using AIX Ultimedia Services to play and edit audio and video files

IBM^(r) offers a full line of multimedia products for the RISC System/6000^(r) (RS/6000(tm)) family. Designed to support industry-standard audio and video formats from PC and workstation environments, the Ultimedia^(r) family for AIX^(r) promotes the sharing of audio and video information while protecting investments in existing hardware, software and multimedia content.

Highlights

• Smart, easy-to-use desktop tools for recording, playing, editing and managing multimedia information.
• Object-based programming environment for developing or enabling multimedia applications.
• 16-bit stereo sound card that provides CD-quality audio support.
• Video input/output (I/O) adapter for monitoring, capturing and creating video material.

Multimedia -- At your service

Ultimedia Services provides the desktop tools and utilities you need to add audio and video support to AIX and provides device control for the Ultimedia Audio and Ultimedia Video I/O adapters.

Easy-to-use tools (such as a media player, audio editor, video editor, video monitor, audio mixer and CD player) provide push-button control for creating and playing multimedia data. These tools are not only simple to use, they are smart. Built using SOMobject(tm) technology from IBM, the players and editors can recognize file attributes such as media types, file types, data formats and compression schemes to minimize the complexity of managing multimedia data. Within the Common Desktop Environment of AIX Version 4.1, working with your multimedia data is even easier with the drag-and-drop feature.

While Ultimedia Services' object technology makes things easy on the desktop, it also helps programmers and multimedia developers create new multimedia applications or add multimedia support to existing applications. By providing an MCI-like programming interface with device control objects and callable multimedia utilities, the power of object-based development can be realized.

The Ultimedia Audio Adapter captures and plays CD-quality, 16-bit, stereo sound on the RS/6000 and PowerPC. You can play movies using advanced decompression and playback routines that rely on the power of the CPU instead of requiring specialized hardware. Ultimedia Services supports the AVI file format with MJPEG, Ultimotion(tm) and Indeo 2.1 compression.

The Ultimedia Video I/O adapter supports live-video monitoring from either camera or videotape input. With the optional compression feature, you can capture material for later playback in Ultimedia Services. You can also encode video clips to video tape for industrial-grade video production or archival output.

Ultimedia for AIX

The Ultimedia family can work for you by:

• Playing back audio and video files you receive from the Internet or other sources
• Using microphone input to record and edit your comments to annotate a spreadsheet, document, data file or office mail
• Adding audio or video help to complement current training programs
• Editing and merging current audio or video files to update old material or create new material using the power and capacity of RS/6000 or PowerPC workstations to edit, consolidate and organize audio and video archives
• Sharing movies or audio files in a mixed environment of workstations and PCs
• Providing a programming application programming interface (API) and reusable multimedia objects to create new applications or add multimedia support to your existing software
• Controlling playback of audio CDs with the new CD player utility
• Monitoring and capturing live video information for video conferencing, video archives, training and annotation

For the casual user

The players and editors use familiar push-button controls. The audio and video editors use simple commands (such as cut, copy, paste and insert) to support basic audio and video editing and composition. It couldn't be easier.

For the advanced user

For the programmer

For the multimedia developer

Features and Benefits

Programming API

• Provides a robust interface for application development following with an MCI paradigm
• Was created with IBM's System Object Module (SOM)
• Contains callable objects with C and C++ bindings that support adding multimedia to existing applications
• Supports Ultimedia Audio and Ultimedia Video I/O adapters
• Supports and M-ACPA on AIX 3.2.5 systems

Media player

• Integrates with the Common Desktop Environment in AIX Version 4.1
• Implements drag-and-drop audio/video files for audio/video playback in AIX Version 4.1
• Has push-button controls for the record, play, stop, volume and rewind functions
• Supports AVI movies with synchronized audio
• Plays MJPEG, Ultimotion and Indeo movie formats as well as most standard audio files

CD player software

• Controls audio CDs
• Provides track selection, repeat selection, programmable play lists, and volume control
• Has track and elapsed time indicators

Audio recorder/editor and audio mixer

• Records, edits and plays back audio files using the Ultimedia Audio Adapter
• Captures material from microphone and other mono or stereo audio sources
• Supports common PC and workstation file types and data formats, including 8-bit PCM, 16-bit PCM, wav, snd, au, Mu-Law and A-Law
• Is a graphical user interface (GUI) waveform editor with cut, copy and paste functions
• Combines and converts multiple audio file formats
• Mixes and captures multiple audio inputs

Movie editor

• Supports the AVI movie format with synchronized audio
• With Video I/O adapter, supports monitoring and capturing live video with MJPEG, Ultimotion, or and Indeo 2.1 compression
• Provides frame-accurate control of play, rewind, fast forward, and slow motion
• Has cut, copy, paste, insert video, and insert audio for movie editing

Compression/Decompression

• Compresses image files for movie creation and conversion routines
• Decompresses movies for editing or conversion
• Converts movies from one file type to another
• Provides an RTV 2.0 decoder to enable Action Media II movie playback
• Encodes and decodes MJPEG, Indeo 2.1, and Ultimotion, and decodes Indeo 3.1

Demo/sample code

• Provides sample audio and video clips and demo code for dictation and text to speech

Voice navigation

• Programmable voice control for desktop applications

Ultimedia Video I/O tools

• Allows motion video clips in MJPEG format or uncompressed still images to be NTSC or PAL encoded for video output
• Provides a 640x480 monitor window for real time viewing of analog video

Ultimedia Audio adapter technical information

The Ultimedia Audio Adapter for RS/6000 workstations provides a cost-effect 16-bit Micro Channel^(r) audio adapter suitable for many applications, such as business audio, multimedia desktop authoring, presentation audio and desktop collaboration. This adapter also provides support for standard I/O devices, including audio players, microphones and speakers and can be internally connected to a CD-ROM reader on selected machine types for playing audio CDs.

The Ultimedia Audio Adapter provides analog audio conversion to and from a digital pulse code modulation (PCM) data format.

The Ultimedia Audio Adapter supports the following:

• Both stereo and mono modes
• Audio formats
  • PCM 8-bit unsigned
  • 16-bit 2's complement in big or little endian format
  • Mu-Law 8-bit companded
  • A-Law 8-bit companded
  • IMA ADPCM 4-bit
• Sample rates (KHz)
  • 5.51, 6.62, 8.0, 9.6, 11.025, 16.0, 18.9, 22.05, 27.42, 32.0, 33.075, 37.8, 44.1, 48.0
• Audio mixing from multiple sources
  • PLAY
  • Mono or stereo mic
  • Right and/or left line N
• Simultaneous play and record
• Four external connections (&frac18. inch / 3.5mm jacks)
  • Left and right microphone input
  • Left and right line input
  • Left and right input
  • Left and right output
  • Left and right headphone output
• System interface
  • 2 DMA channels
  • 16-bit addressing (no parity)
  • 8-bit data (no parity)
• System interface
  • 2 DMA channels
  • 16-bit addressing (no parity)
  • 8-bit data (no parity)
• Input channel bandwidths of 10-20 KHZ
• Signal-to-noise ratio of 80 db typical
• Line level input impedance of 15K ohms typical
• Output line level voltage of two volts peak to peak

Ultimedia Video I/O adapter technical information

The Ultimedia Video I/O adapter is a multipurpose video adapter for RS/6000 workstations. It consists of a single slot Micro Channel card that supports real-time video monitoring on the desktop and capturing single-frame images. The Ultimedia Video I/O adapter also supports the video output of YUV data as NTSC or PAL. Both RCA and S-Video connections are provided.

You can add an optional guest card to support real-time video capture with MJPEG compression or to output a compressed JPEG stream to video.

The base Ultimedia Video I/O adapter supports the following:

• Analog video in NTSC or PAL
• Video monitoring in an X Window
• 8-bit dithered
  • NTSC
    • 320x240 and 160x120 (30 frames per second)
    • 640x480 (15 frames per second)
  • PAL
    • 384x288 and 192x144 (25 frames per second)
    • 768x576 (15 frames per second)
• 24-bit RGB
  • NTSC
    • 160x120 (30 frames per second)
    • 320x240 (15 frames per second)
  • PAL
    • 192x144 (25 frames per second)
    • 384x288 (12.5 frames per second)
• Image capture
  • Single frame or field capture
  • Captured as YUV image, may be converted to 8- or 24-bit RGB
• Four external connectors
  • S-Video jack for video in
  • S-Video jack for video out
  • C-VBS RCA jack for video in
  • C-VBS RCA jack for video out

With the optional compression guest card attached, the Ultimedia Video I/O adapter also supports the following MJPEG video capture:

• 640x240 (30 fields per second)
• 320x240 (30 frames per second)

In addition, the Ultimedia Video I/O adapter with the optional compression guest card attached also supports an MJPEG stream from a disk encoded to NTSC or PAL at 30 frames per second for display on a monitor or output to a video recorder.

System requirements for Ultimedia products

Hardware

• RS/6000 and PowerPC workstations and servers configured with a minimum of one supported display, display adapter, keyboard and mouse
• Ultimedia Audio Adapter or M-ACPA adapter (the adapter requires one Micro Channel^®tm slot)
• Headphones or speaker for audio output
• Microphone for audio input
• Ultimedia Video I/O option (the adapter requires one Micro Channel slot)

Memory

• Minimum 16MB, recommended 32MB

Fixed-disk storage

• Minimum 10MB for Ultimedia Services code
• Minimum 15MB for demo and sample clips
• Additional fixed-disk space for user-created audio and video files

Operating system

• Ultimedia Services Version 1.2 requires AIX Version 3.2.5
• Ultimedia Services Version 2.1 requires AIX Version 4.1 or later

Other software

• AIXwindows(r)/6000 Version 1.2.4 or later
• OSF/Motif(r) Version 1.2

You can also call 1 800 IBM-4FAX (1 800 426-4329) and more information will be faxed immediately to your location.

If you have access to the Internet, you can find additional information on IBM's Worldwide Web server at http://www.ibm.com

^(r)

AIX, AIXwindows, IBM, Micro Channel, RISC System/6000 and Ultimedia are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.

(tm)

RS/6000, SOMobject, and Ultimotion are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.

All other products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

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G-221-4261-00 / G2214261