To: unclewest who wrote (8800 ) 11/18/2000 10:33:50 AM From: James Connolly Respond to Unclewest,wrs.com While you could go so far as to watch TV in the back of this plush car, most folks plan to watch from their living rooms. To that effect, it was interesting to see players such as OpenTV and Canal+ at the show displaying their interactive TV wares. In the past, there typically have been technology providers in the world of digital TV who have implemented proprietary client/server architectures based on multimedia content (i.e. video and audio streams) delivery. These include client stacks that reside in the digital set-top box or digital TV, as well as server-side software to connect to these devices. The leading technology providers of this proprietary software include Liberate and OpenTV. One show attendee commented, "There's nothing open about OpenTV".That's why it was no surprise to see a Wind River pSOS+ -powered set-top box from Philips running a complete-but-early implementation of the MHP classes -- and more was to be found in Sun’s JavaTV booth . Watching the performance of the system surely made a believer out of anyone who thinks Java is too big or too slow for a production digital consumer system.(which was also running Wind River’s pSOS+ RTOS in its reference implementation) . This chipset included all of the technology needed to build a complete satellite or cable set-top box, including MPEG-2 video decoding, Dolby Digital (AC-3) audio decoding, error checking on the multimedia stream, and forward error correction once an error has been found. It's really amazing to consider how much software and hardware technology runs in that innocent little digital set-top box that sits on top of your television! .
