RTOS simplifies videophone operation

The world's first Internet videophone uses Wind River's VxWorks RTOS to control the delivery of TV-quality video calls with the same ease of use as a standard telephone.

The world's first Internet videophone developed by UK-based Motion Media Technology uses Wind River's VxWorks RTOS to control the delivery of TV-quality video calls with the same ease of use as a standard telephone.

"Wind River's VxWorks RTOS has enabled our development teams to hit the ground running with high product differentiation to build the first-ever, true Internet videophone", said John Martin, Technical Director at Motion Media Technology.

"Ensuring we had a reliable and robust real-time operating system inside the mm745 was a must so that the device could perform natural video calls with the lowest possible latency.

We have been able to make the best use of our internal development resources by working with Wind River during the development process".

The IP-based mm745 has more processing power than a PC, and will initially support datarates of between 128Kbit/s and 2Mbit/s, extending to 10Mbit/s in the future.

Wind River's VxWorks RTOS controls a variety of mechanisms to manage the videophone's bandwidth consumption in line with network availability and making deployment possible on any organisation's LAN, WAN or VPN.

The reliability of the VxWorks RTOS enables mm745 to set up video calls in only 10s, taking less time than making a 384K ISDN call where the typical call set-up time is around 30s.

The delays normally associated with compressing, transmitting and decompressing video and audio streams are reduced using VxWorks real-time processing power.

The mm745 has a delay lower than that of a mobile telephone so natural conversation flows.

The VxWorks RTOS supports multiple networking protocols, applications and integration with standard web browsers.

This has enabled Motion Media Technology to develop a device that allows users to simultaneously communicate face-to-face, access web information and personalised software, and send and receive emails via Internet-based accounts.

It also supports an open development environment to allow Motion Media Technology to partner with application providers wanting to provide third-party applications on the phone to further differentiate the product.

Steve Harris, Regional Director, Wind River, said: "Through embracing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) network device software components from Wind River, Motion Media Technology has succeeded in coming to market with a complex networking device that boasts higher levels of performance and product differentiation than before".

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