Multimedia Hardware Adaptation Interfaces Overview

Purpose

Architectural Relationship

Symbian provides APIs for use by hardware integrators so they can implement their own mobile TV solutions.

The APIs are introduced with their components. The Multimedia components DevVideo and DevSound provide APIs for handling the media data once the raw data stream has been extracted by the Multimedia HAI components.

Description

The Multimedia HAI provides support for controlling the hardware component, and handling the data streams.

The APIs provided make it possible to write an implementation of a supported mobile TV standard that can control and manage the incoming signals including splitting the signal into an audio, video and information stream.

Supported Mobile TV standards

Support is currently provided for the DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast-Handset) transmission standard. DVB-H is a superset of the DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcast-Terrestrial) standard.

Other Mobile TV standards

Other standard mobile TV formats include:

• Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB)

• TDtv (subset of TD-CDMA)

• 1seg (part of ISDB-T)

• DAB

• MediaFLO

Note: The Symbian platform does not provide any support for these other standards at present.

Components

The Multimedia HAI collection includes the following:

• Mobile TV DVB-H Receiver HAI

• Video HAI

Mobile TV DVB-H Receiver HAI

The Mobile TV DVB-H Receiver HAI allows an implementation to be written for the only (currently) supported mobile TV standard, DVB-H.

Video HAI

The Video HAI defines an interface for plug-ins that provide video functionality.

Using Multimedia HAI

Hardware integrators can write device drivers or servers to manage the component like:

• Reception of mobile TV signals (currently only DVB-H)

• Video

These components expose APIs that are independent of the underlying implementation and hardware specifics.