Players and Platforms - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 368

21.4.7 Mobile Phones

The H.264 standard was explicitly designed for delivery on mobile phones. Some experi-
ments with H.26L codecs took place in the United Kingdom in 2002-03 to prove that video
could be delivered to mobile phones known as 2.5G devices. Now that the 3G devices are
rolling out, video is becoming an important selling point for the new handsets. This is
attracting subscribers to those providers who deliver video alongside the other voice and
data services.

21.5 Players

Let's look at the part of the equation involving the players. When compared to each other,
they have some similarities and also some important differences.

Note that some players may not implement all of the decoding they could.
The standards may describe a minimal level of decoding, but more sophis-
ticated players and decoders may work harder to display a better-looking
picture. If you think your encoding is set up correctly but you still see arti-
facts on one player, test the content on several others, if you can, to see if it
is a player issue rather than an encoder issue.

There are fashionable trends that come and go, and it is currently a popular design
gambit to style the players as if they were made of brushed aluminium. Changing the
appearance of the players or reducing them to just a video window is easy to do.
Embellishing them with your own borders and controls is also a popular pastime for video
enthusiasts. They call this 'skinning,' and the product is called a 'skin.'
Examine the technology that supports this appearance-tuning support in your
player. It is far more useful to deliver this appearance code with the content rather than
load it as a property of the player. Players implement support for this in different ways.
By the way, this decorative matter is sometimes referred to as “window chrome”—a term
that was probably derived from the material on 1950s automobiles.
There are four players in common use today:

Apple QuickTime

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RealNetworks

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Microsoft Windows Media

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Macromedia Flash

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