Open MPEG Committee

The Open MPEG (OM-1) committee was organized to promote a common application interface for MPEG hardware. In addition, the OM-1 Consortium wishes to drive MPEG technology in the marketplace by promoting more applications that use MPEG hardware.

IBM is participating in the OM-1 committee to assist in the design and development of a cross-platform API specification. The DOS API specification has already been presented and voted into approval by the consortium. The cross-platform API is currently in the proposal state and has not been voted into approval.

The OM-1 MPEG beta on Volume 9 of The Developer Connection comprises the initial OS/2 support for the proposed OM-1 cross-platform API. The video support with OS/2 OM-1 includes software and hardware MPEG video playback support through both the OM-1 APIs and through the media control interface (MCI) for backward compatibility.

The beta for OS/2 MPEG support includes an installation to add an OM-1 video player to your OS/2 multimedia subsystem. With this, a media control device (MCD) is installed to provide MPEG support through the current OS/2 multimedia players. Additionally, a sample is installed that demonstrates using the OM-1 API directly.

The beta for the OS/2 OM-1 solution includes a subset of the complete OM-1 specification. Primarily, this subset includes playback from an MPEG file. Audio support from MPEG video files is only provided with hardware support such as MWAVE or MPEG hardware cards.

The OS/2 OM-1 API supports MPEG hardware through the current video device driver model as already defined for OS/2. You can find samples of the MPEG video device drivers are in the Developer Connection Device Driver Kit for OS/2.

Reprint Courtesy of International Business Machines Corporation, © International Business Machines Corporation