Role of the Multimedia Test Utilities

Updated: April 19, 2023

The Multimedia for QNX SDP includes several utilities to help you rapidly prototype, test, and debug media applications.

These utilities let you issue basic commands to encode and decode media streams and to play tracks without having to manage communication sessions with multimedia services or manually define inputs and outputs. In particular, you can:

When you're writing early versions of applications 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 multimedia 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 complex use cases and to optimize performance and user experience.

Through the QNX Software Center (QSC), you can obtain the binaries of all test utilities and source code examples for some of them.

Our multimedia software includes these test utilities:
Utility name(s) Description QSC package with binary1 QSC package with source code1
audio-decode, audio-encode, omxalplay, omxal-showmetadata, video-decode, video-encode Test key operations supported by the OpenMAX AL media engine. This guide doesn't describe these utilities but the QNX Additions to OpenMAX AL guide gives a tutorial on how to perform the operations of audio-decode. Encoding and Casting OpenMAX AL Examples Source Code
mmcli Tests APIs by forwarding commands from a script file or an interactive session to a loaded library or service Playback
mmrplay Plays or records media through mm-renderer, after configuring the service based on command-line options Playback Media Renderer API Examples Source Code
1 All QSC packages containing multimedia binaries or source code examples have names beginning with QNX® SDP 7.1 Multimedia - . For brevity, we avoid listing this first part of the package name, and just list the second part, which describes the specific content of the package.