Khronos Releases OpenKODE 1.0 Royalty-Free Standard for Mobile Rich-Media and Graphics Application Portability

Business Wire, Feb 11, 2008

Multiple Conformant Implementations Shipping; Free Development SDKs Available; Support From Operators and Handset OEMs; Open Source OpenKODE Project Announced

BARCELONA, Spain -- The Khronos[TM] Group announced today that it has publicly released the final OpenKODE[TM] 1.0 specification, a royalty-free, cross-platform open standard that bundles a set of native APIs to provide increased source portability for rich media and graphics applications. Khronos is also releasing a full conformance test suite for OpenKODE 1.0 to enable conformant implementations to use the OpenKODE trademark. Multiple Khronos members are demonstrating fully conformant OpenKODE implementations at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and are offering free development SDKs. Khronos has also announced a supportive collaboration with the FreeKODE Project to create an open source version of OpenKODE. An OpenKODE whitepaper and the OpenKODE 1.0 specification is available for download at www.khronos.org/openkode/. The specification may be used royalty-free by implementers and developers.

Mobile developers routinely need to maintain hundreds of source versions for every application to handle functional differences between handsets, resulting in significantly increased porting and testing costs, and slowing innovation. Additionally, the interaction between multiple graphics and media APIs is typically not defined, hindering the development of innovative mixed-media user interfaces and applications. The bundle of native, royalty-free APIs in OpenKODE 1.0 helps solve these problems.

"The usability of the Apple iPhone has already had a major impact on the mobile industry, and now consumers demand compelling and highly functional user interfaces and applications which, in turn demand highly-integrated graphics acceleration architectures," said analyst Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research. "Khronos is to be applauded for creating an open standard that not only tackles the problem of mobile platform fragmentation head on, but also delivers an open architecture that can provide a low-level media processing foundation for a wide range of software platforms such as Windows Mobile, Brew, Symbian UIQ, S60, Limo, Google Android and WIPI - all of which need to deliver stunning rich media in the palm of your hand."

The new OpenKODE Core API is a small and light abstraction layer that will be familiar to POSIX and C programmers for accessing operating system resources while minimizing source changes when porting applications between Linux, Rex/Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms. OpenKODE Core provides advanced functionality, such as multi-threading under an event-driven architecture; while being carefully designed to provide real-world portability to a wide variety of mobile platforms. An OpenKODE Core library is typically under 100KB in size.

"OpenKODE will play a key role in the development of rich media applications and services in the Korean market, as this new standard is extremely complementary to WIPI-GIGA and other software platforms," said Hoo-Jong Kim, Head of Mobile Device Development Team, SK Telecom. "As an operator and Khronos Board member, we strongly welcome the reduction in platform fragmentation and the increase in rich media acceleration that the OpenKODE standard provides."

OpenKODE 1.0 also defines a state-of-the-art media-stack architecture by bringing together the Khronos OpenGL[R] ES and OpenVG[TM] media APIs through EGL 1.3 plus a set of EGL extensions for acceleration of mixed 3D and vector 2D graphics. OpenKODE will use upcoming versions of EGL to integrate synchronization and data processing of streaming media using the OpenSL ES[TM] and OpenMAX[TM] media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio functionality that is fully integrated with graphics processing; for accelerating a wide variety of software including 3D user interfaces and games, Flash and SVG players, TV and video applications and media players. Through the relevant JSRs, OpenKODE can also provide acceleration for Java as well as native applications.

"OpenKODE Core has been designed by a group of companies within the Khronos Group that have the in-depth experience to provide state-of-the-art functionality in a way that is genuinely portable over a wide range of mobile platforms. OpenKODE will protect developers from having to gain that same encyclopedic knowledge the hard way," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenKODE working group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA is using the OpenKODE standard to deliver the full power and flexibility of our new generation of application processors. We are showing a fully conformant OpenKODE, including fully accelerated OpenGL ES and OpenVG seamlessly integrated through EGL, here in Barcelona on the new NVIDIA APX 2500."

All APIs included in a conformant OpenKODE implementation must pass the individual conformance tests defined for that API - including OpenKODE Core. In addition, OpenKODE defines a set of trans-API conformance tests to ensure that the media APIs and EGL correctly provide the specified mixed media functionality - an important factor in genuinely reducing platform fragmentation for application developers. The OpenKODE conformance test suite has been created by Futuremark Corporation under contract to Khronos and is available through the Khronos Group OpenKODE Adopters program - more details here www.khronos.org/adopters/.>