[ Thanks to Werther for
this link. ]
“Industry leaders including 3dfx, 3Dlabs, ATI, Compaq, Discreet,
Evans & Sutherland, IBM, Intel, S3, and SGI today unveiled
their collective vision to develop a standard application
programming interface for graphics, video, and audio media devices.
Creation of a standardized API will allow digital content
application developers to more easily integrate video and graphics
capabilities into their application suites, and will make these
applications more portable over multiple operating systems, CPU
architectures, and add-in hardware devices. Similar to the current
industry standard for professional 3D graphics — OpenGL®, this
new API will consist of standard techniques for input and output of
digital video and audio data, and will include extensions to OpenGL
to support seamless video and graphics integration.”
“OpenML, a new specification for this innovative technology,
will be developed through the combined contributions of the members
of the Khronos Special Interest Group (SIG). These technology
vendors are contributing a range of industry experience. Critical
digital content application authoring expertise, for example, comes
from Discreet and others. 3dfx, 3Dlabs, ATI, Evans &
Sutherland, and S3 are responsible for the development of the
OpenGL extension specifications for integrating video data types
with 3D graphics. The determination of what implications this
synchronization and integration has for future platforms, comes
from Intel, IBM, Compaq, and SGI. Experience in real time digital
media input/output/processing is provided with the utilization of
dmSDK 2.0 from SGI as a foundation for the standardization of video
and audio input/output.”
“OpenML will eliminate the need for professional application
developers to develop different and proprietary programming
interfaces for various media input and output devices. In addition,
implementations of the API across multiple operating systems will
enable portability of software applications. Extensions to OpenGL
that handle compositing of multiple graphics and video streams will
make it easier to enable the direct implementation of mixing 2D,
3D, audio, and video data to create dazzling effects in authored
content. Other OpenGL extensions will relate to enabling high
quality rendered output.”