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Multimedia on BlackBerry 7 was based on the multimedia JSR (135). There were a lot of limitations regarding supported formats, how many sounds could be played at the same time, and even what worked on which device.

In BlackBerry 10, there are a wide range of supported codecs, containers, and protocols.

For video, we recommend an MP4 containing H.264 video at 720p and AAC audio. For audio, it depends a lot on your use case. In addition to mainstays such as MP3 and AAC, we support things like FLAC and Ogg Vorbis.

To actually play your multimedia, you should be looking at the MediaPlayer class. That will handle audio or video. You can also easily play the built in system sounds with the SystemSound class.

• Tutorial: Playing Audio or Video
• Tutorial: Playing SystemSounds in an app

Recording audio is through the AudioRecorder class. You can record a few different formats, including AAC (.mp4) and PCM (.wav).

• Recording Audio

This is all pretty straightforward and should be pretty easy to adjust to if you are used to the Java way of doing things. There are a few key differences that you might not be expecting though.

The first is the NowPlayingConnection. If you are building any sort of media player type application: use it. What it does is let the user control the volume and playback of your app from in another app, using the volume keys on the side. You can also provide a bit of data like a thumbnail image and the current song playing. No user is going to want to have to go back into your application just to change the volume, and it’s really easy to implement.

• Working with NowPlayingConnection

Secondly, unlike in BlackBerry 7, in BlackBerry 10 you can enable echo cancellation in order to do VoIP. There is no convenient Qt API to do this, but you can use QSA and open a connection to the “voice” PCM audio interface.

• BlackBerry 10 VoIP

The other big difference is that you can’t just feed bytes directly into the media player. You need to have an actual file to play, or be using one the streaming protocols supported. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from dropping down to OpenAL/ALUT and doing whatever you need if that’s your style. You also have QSA available as mentioned before, as well as mm-renderer (which is what MediaPlayer is using), but that is all beyond the scope of this article.

RIM President and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis showcased some amazing BlackBerry PlayBook apps yesterday at the Adobe MAX conference with Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe. The above video highlights some of what Mike and Kevin demoed during the keynote, such as the BlackBerry PlayBook’s multimedia capabilities (including web based videos using Adobe Flash), multitasking and the eUnity healthcare application. All apps demoed during the keynote were built by developers working with the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR as part of an early access program. The other applications included:

SAP Crystal Solutions Dashboard and CIO Cockpit by SAP
Chatter, an enterprise IM application by salesforce.com

Check out the BlackBerry PlayBook demo video to see what they showed on stage and post a comment to let us know what you liked the most!