zMoviePlayer

  zMoviePlayer is a full solution which will enable telecom operators and content aggregator to deliver live multimedia content to java enabled mobile phones. The solution is MIDP compatible.

   The solution consists of two parts: 

1. zMoviePlayer Midlet:

  The zMoviePlayer midlet is a J2ME video player. This midlet is MIDP 1.0 compatible and should work on all j2me compatible java mobile phones. The midlet can play both compressed and uncompressed movies. For a handset to support compressed movies, it should support image transparency. Whereas all uncompressed movies can be played on any java mobile phone. 

  Most popular java enabled mobile phones support transparency like Nokia 3510i, Nokia 3410, Nokia 7210, Nokia 7650, Siemens M50, Siemens C55, Siemens S55, and Motorola T720. Some devices are known not to support image transparency like Motorola V66i, V60i. 

  zMoviePlayer midlet can play both b/w and color movies. Results of playing a color movie on b/w device are not guaranteed and it depends heavily on how the manufacturer has implemented color approximation. Also playing a movie on specific handset depends heavily on display capabilities of the specified handset. Color handsets offer usually between 256 and 65536 colors. 

   We have an optimized version of the midlet for every handset. The optimized version will use Manufacturers extensions (Nokia, Siemens, Motorola Extensions) to optimize the midlet to use best the handset's capabilities like: faster frame rate, music add-on, sound add-on, controlling of lights. .. . . etc. Also making different versions of the midlet is necessary because of some known software bugs in some handsets. Still the kernel of the decompression algorithm remains the same for all handsets, ensuring that the content to be delivered is unique for all MIDP devices. Currently we are working on optimized versions for Nokia 3410 (Series 30 b/w), 3510i (Series 30 Color), 7210 (Series 40), 7650 (Series 60), Siemens M50/C55, S55, and Motorola i85,i95, and T720.

  zMoviePlayer midlet has two different packages that could be used differently by operators and telecom companies: 

1. REAL TIME Movie and Video Player: The midlet can play movies in REAL TIME at 4 fps (frames per second) on GPRS connection at 40kbits/s  if it uses low resolution movies (96x64 pixels, 80x80 pixels) with 256 colors. It will run at about 2 fps  on GPRS connection at 40kbits/s if it uses high resolution movies (120x120 pixels) with 256 colors.
2. Delivery of Small multimedia content: Deploying small movies to mobile java handsets. In this case the movie is bundled in the midlet itself. This option is optimal for delivering news, greetings, short video clips, advertisements, animated screensavers, personalized messages. Imagine for example an important football game between two teams, and one of them has just scored a goal. Now we can provide mobile users with the ability to view the scored goal on their mobile. In this solution we are only limited by the max size of the midlet (on most devices it's 64k so we can show approximately 12 seconds). 

2. zmpConverter:

zmpConverter will convert common video contents like MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 files to our specific formats: compressed movies or mcv files (mobile compressed video) and uncompressed movies or mrv files (mobile raw video). The program can converts video content on the fly to our new formats, allowing the midlet to access them (through an internet connection). So users can watch their favorite TV shows on their java enabled mobiles on the move. 

Using this program we can also:

1. Determine the type of the output file, compressed or not, color depth used (2bits, 4bits, 8 bits, 12bits), lossless or with lossy compression.  

2. The resolution of the output movie. The program will auto size the input movie to fit to the target resolution. Advised resolutions are:

• Low resolutions: 96x64 (MIDP Minimum Standard), 80x80.
• High resolutions: 120x120.

3. Perform a tunable lossy compression, thus decreasing the required bandwidth without much affecting the size.  Usually we have gained about 20% using a lossy compression without much affecting the quality of the image. This option might be important if we want somehow higher frame rate or higher resolution.  

4. Decrease the number of output colors, thus improving frame rate or resolution a lot.

5. Controls frame rate of the output movie.

6. Add music, sound and several effects. The midlet will interpret these info, only if the hardware can support them i.e. only if there's a manufacturer extension allowing the use of these extra info as there's no MIDP standard for doing that. 

7. Automatically generate advertisement or news midlets as described above in zMoviePlayer midlet. The program will generate a .jar and .jad files ready to be sent immediately to the phone.

A DEMO VERSION ABOUT THE WORK WILL BE AVAILABLE SOON.

Further reading:

  To read more about the history of zMoviePlayer please refer to the article here. This article was published on radio-gamer on 12-08-2002.