Is video on the Sidekick finally coming?! A recent surf of Danger’s job page has given us an insight as to what the next generation Sidekick might have instore. With the combination of TMo’s EDGE and the eventual roll out of UTMS, it seems that broadband video could become a reality on everyone’s favorite device! As always, this is just speculation at this point, but it sounds like the Sidekick 3/4 might handle MPEG-4, H.263, H.264/AVC, WMV 7/8, VC-1/WMV9 codecs.

For those interested (and hopefully someone qualified) here is the job description:

Senior Video Software Engineer
Department: Library
Location: Palo Alto, California

As a Senior Video Software Engineer, you will be responsible for moving Danger’s hiptop platform into the video age. We already have the best audio system in the mobile industry; now leverage your deep knowledge of video to take our multimedia architecture to the next level.

Responsibilities

* Help craft the video strategy for Danger’s hiptop platform, including evaluating various 3rd-party video solutions, and recommending hardware changes for future devices.
* Integrate 3rd-party video software into the existing platform and audio engine. Optimize, debug, and maintain this code. Most of this work will be done in straight C, but some inline ARM assembly and DSP coding will be required.
* Expose video features through an extensible and customizable Java library API. Tutor application-level Java engineers, both internal and external, on this API, and help them make best use of it in their code.
* Search for innovative ways to incorporate video into the hiptop experience, including leveraging the unique Danger service architecture.
* Create test suites and work with QA to deliver the highest quality mobile video applications in the industry.

Qualifications
* BSCS/BSCE/BSEE degree and 8 + years continuous experience developing in C/C++, preferably in a technical lead role for some of this time
* 2 years experience developing in Java, preferably with some object-oriented library and API development
* 2 years experience focused on video record and playback, including codec and DSP experience
* Familiarity with popular video codec formats, such as: MPEG-4, H.263, H.264/AVC, WMV 7/8, VC-1/WMV9, etc.
* Familiarity with popular video file formats, such as MP4, AVI, etc.
* Experience integrating and debugging 3rd-party source and object code
* A solid understanding of multithreaded programming concepts
* Experience with ARM9 and ARM11 assembly language programming in an embedded environment, and TI OMAP DSP programming, is highly desirable

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Danger, Features, Rumors, Sidekick III, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.