Role of the Multimedia Test Utilities

The QNX® SDK for Apps and Media 1.0 includes several multimedia utilities to help you rapidly prototype, test, and debug media apps.

These utilities let you issue basic commands to play tracks and upload media information to databases without having to manage communication sessions with multimedia services or manually define inputs and outputs. The binaries of mmcli and mmrplay are included in the platform installer, which unpackages them on your host system. You can obtain the source code for mmrplay and mm-pnp by requesting it through QNX customer service.

Using the multimedia test and demo tools, you can:

learn about the media information flow between the device publishers, the QDB database server, the mm-sync service, and the mm-renderer service
play an audio or video file through mm-renderer by issuing a single command
exercise the APIs of the multimedia services and libraries included with the product
adapt the code in the multimedia plug-and-play program (mm-pnp) to customize the process of detecting mediastores and then synchronizing and playing their media content

When you're writing early versions of media apps and you need to support only common use cases, it's convenient to use the multimedia test utilities because you need to know relatively few commands. The device publishers and the QDB, mm-sync, and mm-renderer services all have more complicated command interfaces that require more time to learn and start using. These services should be used in later development stages to support more complex use cases and to optimize performance and the user experience.