Outsourcing Consulting News
Codec Development and Porting
Customer
The customer is a Virginia-based company that specializes in developing innovative and efficient consumer electronic technology. Since the company's creation seven years ago, it has been leading the way in the development of memory-efficient and high-quality voice compression tools based on patented audio compression algorithm.
Business Case
The customer's audio Player allows to play player-based audio files as well as to convert them to WAV format. It was originally designed to run on Windows platform and need to be available on Windows mobile platform as well. A set of codec plug-ins also needed to be developed that would allow the Player to function correctly on a mobile platform as well as encode/decode audio files of different formats.
Before contacting SoloSoft, the client worked with couple of other offshore development companies, however, they could not complete the project according to specifications. The result was a loss of time and money that delayed customer's release dates.
Solution
The developed codec is a plug-in solution for Windows and Windows Mobile platforms ranging from Desktops, to notebooks to Pocket PC's/PDAs. This plug-in solution allows users to encode voice files with the Windows / Windows Mobile based Sound Recorder applications, and can decode the files using players such as Windows Media Player.
SoloSoft also performed audio Player porting from Windows to Windows mobile platforms.
Features
Audio Player porting from Windows to WM5
Supports conversions from Player format to WAV and vise versa.
The "Send via email" option in WM5 Player attaches the voice file in the default email account.
WM5 Player can switch between portrait and landscape mode.
WM5 Player supports: PocketPC, PocketPC phone, Smartphone such as Dell Axim X30/50v, HP iPAQ 4700 series, Audiovox XV-6700 etc.
PC Codec Driver
16 KHz codec driver on Windows Intel PC platform.
The project involved creating wrappers (APIs) on top of the original code / SDK.PDA Codec Driver
16 KHz ACM codec driver on Windows PDA (PocketPC) platform running on WM5 and compatible with WM 2003.
.NET integration with 8/16 Khz codec on PC/WM5
The .NET based Player application integrates with the 8/16 KHz and the Player file format.
Challanges
Port Optimization for: Ti 54x, Ti 55x, Ti 64 platforms
The unoptimized port could only accept PCM wav 8 KHz 16 Bit with RIFF header size of 44 bytes. By the end of the project the flexibility issue was resolved. As a result, the user was able to pass PCM 8 KHz 8/16 bit with no restrictions of RIFF byte header size of 44 bytes.
Tools and Technologies
C/C++, .NET 2.0, C# and VB.NET, MS Visual Studio 2005