Press Release

RidgeRun Announces Open Multimedia InterfaceTM for Linux

New York - January 31, 2001 - At LinuxWorld today, RidgeRun, Inc., announced their Open Multimedia Interface (OMI), an API and multimedia plug-in for Linux. With OMI, Linux software developers now have an easy way to integrate multimedia functionality into applications and games. OMI is simple, powerful and lightweight to meet the constraints of embedded devices as well as supporting high-end systems. The company's intent is to help developers create multimedia-enabled applications and games for Linux. RidgeRun's DSPLinuxTM excels at running multimedia content on embedded systems by using the strengths of Digital Signal Processors.

RidgeRun has announced sponsorship for GStreamer, a popular Open Source streaming media framework, which is an important infrastructure component of OMI.  "There are many great Open Source libraries out there," said Phil Verghese, RidgeRun's CTO, "but most are tied to specific applications and few scale well.  GStreamer stands out from the rest, because of its good design and multimedia performance." Verghese explained, "Within the Linux community today, there is a considerable excitement and activity around integrating multimedia into applications and games.  At RidgeRun, we want to promote and foster that activity to enable more compelling Linux applications.  OMI offers  a powerful, yet simple to use API which easily supports current and future multimedia standards, in an application-friendly Open Source framework that extends the great foundation of GStreamer."

Developers are encouraged to visit http://omi.sourceforge.net to contribute to this project.  The first version of the OMI interface will be released there in the next few weeks, along with future enhancements to GStreamer.  OMI and GStreamer are both released under the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL).

About RidgeRun, Inc.

RidgeRun, Inc. is exclusively focused on bringing the reliability and flexibility of Linux to embedded Internet appliances based on DSPs (digital signal processors). RidgeRun's DSPLinux is the operating system that leverages the power of Texas Instruments' DSP architectures to deliver the performance-leading platform for wireless, broadband and multimedia appliances. DSPLinux is optimized for high performance OEM devices including mobile phones, digital cameras, audio and video players, automotive systems, set-top boxes, home networking gateways, and PDAs. The RidgeRun team has extensive experience in developing world-class embedded systems, fault-tolerant software and high performance Linux solutions. RidgeRun can be reached at www.ridgerun.com or by e-mail to info@ridgerun.com.