Ma.tt (his actual domain name), the father of the WordPress blogging system, snapped this photo at the SxSW event and it gave me a cold chill for some reason:
I did a little searching and realized that I had already been exposed to the idea that Blu-Ray was colluding with Java. Now it occurs to me to wonder: Has there been demand for free multimedia players to support the Java functionality necessary to play Blu-Ray discs?
Google has unveiled their mighty Android platform SDK today. It apparently based uses that phone-based flavor of Java. An ergonomic Eclipse-based development environment and a software emulator are both provided for your experimentation.
That’s nice. But let’s cut to what really matters — multimedia. The SDK specifies the Media API along with its MediaPlayer and MediaRecorder APIs. According to the AudioEncoder class, audio can be encoded to AMR-NB. The VideoEncoder class specifies H.263, H.264, and MPEG-4 SP. All pretty standard for a mobile application, I suppose.
Who handles the multimedia heavy lifting? Vitor noticed this press release and associated fluffy overview from PacketVideo
It’s Java, though, and that means obfuscated Java bytecode programs. Time for a renaissance for my Java de-obfuscator?
IMDb Studio Briefing carries a news snippet today about new Blu-Ray discs that can play in Sony PlayStation 3 units but not in standalone players: Sony Encounters New Blu-ray Glitches. It seems that the new discs use some system called BD-Java for processing extras and additional features. Just when you thought multimedia tech couldn’t get more complicated and bloated. So now players have to have some kind of Java VM?
As usual, Wikipedia is on top of it.
Just in case anyone is following this blog in hopes of finding information about a Java-related COD file format that I mentioned last year, some folks at a blog called Reverse & ?????? (would love to know what that title means) have posted a 2-part (so far) analysis of the format. Part 1 and Part 2.