Search by company

Software promises cost-effective PVRs

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team May 27, 2003

A novel personal video recorder software development kit will help set-top box and iDTV manufacturers build competitively priced PVR products for the rapidly growing free-to-air terrestrial market.

Cabot Communications has launched a personal video recorder (PVR) software development kit to help set-top box and iDTV manufacturers build competitively priced PVR products for the rapidly growing free-to-air terrestrial market.

The PVR software development kit is an addition to Cabot's Eclipse DVB middleware package that significantly shortens manufacturers' development time, allowing them to build digital TV stacks for set-top boxes or integrated digital TVs within weeks rather than months.

Cabot is already working with a number of manufacturers who are looking to differentiate set-top box and iDTV products by adding PVR capability.

Until now, the difficulty of creating a compelling human user interface for PVR technology has presented an obstacle for manufacturers.

However, Cabot's portable software, available on multiple CPU architectures, addresses this problem by providing a powerful and customisable user interface framework.

Cabot's new software development kit (SDK) allows manufacturers to provide core PVR functionality such as record from EPG, one button record and time/date recording.

Additionally, it supports "trick modes" as programme pause, skipping, slow motion and fast-forward.

It also provides comprehensive library capabilities for managing and archiving recorded content and used together with the Eclipse PC Emulator enables manufacturers to create an intuitive, easy to use interface for PVR functionality, with a branded look and feel.

"As specialists in our field of expertise, it is essential that we drive market development, rather than respond to needs, therefore ensuring maximum return on investment for our partners", said Keith Potter, Cabot's Managing Director.

"The success of Freeview in the UK, has encouraged consumers to look again at PVR technology and we believe our new Eclipse PVR SDK will help manufacturers bring compelling products to market quickly.

As the industry's technology partner of choice, we are able to engineer a fully featured and reliable, yet high performance implementation of PVR technology for future generations of set-top boxes and integrated digital TV designs".

The Eclipse PVR system is delivered as a comprehensive SDK complete with libraries, API documentation and porting guides.

As part of the Cabot Digital TV Software Suite, Eclipse is fully integrated with the Cabot Mercator MHEG-5 engine and the Callisto over-air-download products.

Eclipse is also particularly attractive for manufacturers who require a complete out-of-the-box European-wide DVB-T solution.