For those of you who still think that it’s Dilithium Crystals which power the SS Enterprise, the company that named itself after that famous mythical substance has come out with a set of video processes to work with Android handsets.
The company called itself Dilithium Networks because it could find no other notable URL, and initially made video transcoders for cellular networks. These are appliances which sit in the network and allow the transformation of one type of video which suits one handset, able to travel to another device which uses different formats on a different network.
But more recently the company has co-invented and campaigned for rapid video enablement on phones through something called Media Oriented Negotiation Acceleration (MONA) which allows video to zip across a cellular network in under 1 second, hoping that it will facilitate video conferencing and video ring tones on handsets.
For video ring tones, using MONA there are two handsets and an IP attached server which talk through a cellular operator’s mobile gateway. In under 1 second the right video has to be selected on the server, the handset being called needs a MONA interrogation to identify the right codec, and then the video has to be transcoded to that codec, as the right resolution, in real time and streamed across the network. The server then has to drop out of the conversation and leave the two handsets still in touch with one another. This was pioneered at one major operator in Indonesia, a country where everyone has a video ringtone which appears on the phone you are ringing to identify you at the price a few pounds a month.
Dilithium and Packet Video, another US handset video specialist, put their ideas together and co-invented the standard, and now have products for cellular networks which enable it, with the Dilithium product line called the Dilithium Content Adaptor. It needs no software stack on the handset but the network appliances need to be aware of how new handsets support video and this has now been made Android aware and can work with the new G1. The company has already done the same for the Apple iPhone
The DCA software supports live and pre-recorded video clips in a wide range of video formats and performs on the fly transport, media format selection, codec and bitrate adaptation. G1 users can now have VoD streaming without any special application over any network – WiFi, WiMax, 3G or 3.5G (HSDPA) networks.
The DCA features a PHP-based high level API that offers easy integration in operator and service provider frameworks and workflows. DCA also supports ad-insertion. Dilithium has deployments in 60 countries which reach over 1 billion subscribers.