Hello World! My name is James Nash and I am (nearly) one of the package owners from the multimedia tech domain. As Martin wrote in his “Broadening the Community” post, us multimedia package owner folk will be introducing ourselves on this blog over the coming weeks. I thought I’d get the ball rolling by being the first, hopefully the others will take the plunge soon after! 
I am a software engineer at Nokia, based in our London office. Currently I work in the team that is responsible for the low-level video functionality. The specifics of this are probably a bit too involved for this introductory post, so I’ll try to explain how we fit into the bigger picture in future posts. For now let’s just say we’re the guys that make sure your Symbian phone knows how to play and record videos.
At the moment there is a single “Multimedia package” in the Symbian Foundation that covers all the low-level frameworks and functionality for things like audio, video, camera and imaging. There’s quite a lot of stuff in that package so there’s a plan to split off the audio, video, camera and imaging-specific bits into packages of their own. The current multimedia package will continue to exist too but will only contain the bits that are generic or don’t neatly fit into one of the new packages. Each of the new packages will have its own package owner and I will be the one for video. (Hence my introduction as a “package owner-to-be”)
When the split happens I intend to hit the ground running which is why I’m already starting to get involved in package owner activities now. I am therefore assisting the current multimedia package owner, Jeremy Murray-Wakefield (who I’m sure will introduce himself here too) at the moment (though with a bias towards video-related things). Both of us will be attending SEE 2009 where we’ll be running a Multimedia Birds of a Feather meeting. We’ll be posting more details in due course, but we’d love it if you could swing by to chat! The more the merrier!
I’m really looking forward to working with the broader Symbian Foundation community. If you’re interested in using, developing or adding to the video package please get in touch! You can reach me at: james.nash [AT] nokia [DOT] com, via the mm package mailing list and also find me lurking in the developer forums under the username cirrus.
