codecpack

The codec pack brings modern audio and video formats to Phorepoc OS. It's FFmpeg and OpenH264 ported to Phorepoc OS, so the phone can play H.264, HEVC, VP8 and VP9 video and AAC, MP3, Opus, Vorbis and FLAC audio in MP4, Matroska and Ogg files. Without it, games and apps with MP4 video play silently.

You don't build it into an image. Users install it from Catalogue when they want it.

Why it lives on its own

There are two reasons. The first is the license. FFmpeg is LGPL, so it's built as its own library (pheffmpeg.dll) that the system loads at run time. It never ends up inside any of Phorepoc OS's own binaries, and you can swap it for your own build.

The second is patents. AAC and H.264 are in a grey area, so the pack is never part of a Phorepoc OS image. It's a separate download, and it's up to each user whether to install it.

Releases

Every release has the pack as an installable SIS file for each architecture: codecpack-arm.sis for phones and codecpack-x32.sis for the PC. The release workflow builds them from this repository with the pdk's package.yml, and Catalogue installs them.

We don't keep copies of FFmpeg or OpenH264 here. The recipes download the exact releases they name and check them against a SHA-256. FFmpeg is never configured with --enable-gpl, --enable-version3 or --enable-nonfree, and the build stops if FFmpeg reports any license other than LGPL 2.1 or later.

Building

The recipes run in the toolchain's ghcr.io/phorepoc/web image. Check out core and the pdk next to this repository and run phe source export -a once. Then:

docker run --rm -e ARCH=arm -e JOBS=4 -e PHOREPOC_BUILD=/build \
    -e PHOREPOC_CORE=/src/core -e PHOREPOC_PDK=/src/pdk \
    -v "$PWD/../core/build:/build" -v "$PWD/..:/src" -w /src/codecpack \
    ghcr.io/phorepoc/web ./build.sh

Use ARCH=x32 for the PC. The libraries land in $PHOREPOC_BUILD/codecpack/.

Next, build the components with this repository added to PHOREPOC_ADAPTATIONS, after your device's own repositories. On the PC, pheffmpeg also needs cxxrt, so build that first and add it too.

PHOREPOC_ADAPTATIONS=<device repositories>:<path to codecpack> phe component build -arch arm pheffmpeg phefftest
PHOREPOC_ADAPTATIONS=<device repositories>:<path to codecpack> phe component build ariheaacdecwrapper \
    ariheaacdecmmfcodec aacdecoderconfig eaacplusutil eaacplusaudiocontrollerutility \
    aacaudioplaycontrollerplugin aacaudioplaycontrollerrecognizer

What's in here

• recipes/ downloads and builds FFmpeg and OpenH264. build.sh runs them all in order.
• os/src/pheffmpeg/ is the library the video player loads, a small C API over FFmpeg's decoders.
• os/src/phevdecsw/ is the software video decoder plug-in (phevdecsw.dll) the video player finds through DevVideo; it decodes through pheffmpeg.dll. On ARM it only takes MPEG-4 Part 2, since the board's video engine does the rest.
• os/src/codecs/ has the AAC decoder behind the system's own audio framework (the MMF), now running on FFmpeg.
• os/src/phefftest/ is a test program that opens and decodes sample clips.
• registry/components_codecpack.py lists the components.

License

Our code and the Symbian files we've changed are EPL-2.0 with GPL-2.0-or-later as a Secondary License. FFmpeg is LGPL-2.1 or later and OpenH264 is BSD-2-Clause. NOTICE and LICENSES/ have the details, including the note on patents.

Contributions are welcome under the same terms. Add your name to AUTHORS in your first pull request.