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Graphical development for digital TV

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team May 28, 2004

The Observatory PC Development Studio is billed as the first PC-based Windows implementation of a DVB digital receiver.

The Observatory PC Development Studio is billed as the first PC-based Windows implementation of a DVB digital receiver.

Observatory PC Development Studio allows manufacturers to build, test and simulate customised DVB software applications within previously impossible timescales.

Cabot's customers have achieved up to a fivefold increase in development times using Observatory as compared with traditional embedded development tools.

Keith Potter, Managing Director of Cabot Communications comments: "Traditionally manufacturers have had to wait for hardware and middleware integration before they can begin the painful process of user interface (UI) development within the cumbersome embedded tools environment".

"Observatory is the first environment that combines a productive UI development tool with a real implementation of a DVB middleware stack." "Observatory is a unique tool that allows realistic real life prototyping and testing of receiver user interfaces with a variety of user-cases without any hardware platform".

"The real benefit for manufacturers is that they can build innovative customised User Interfaces for an improved customer experience without holding up the product development cycle." Cabot developed Observatory as a graphical coding environment, rather than a menu builder tool.

Years of experience of UI development have proved that graphical non-coding tools do not provide the flexibility and code efficiency required by the resource-constrained receiver developments.

Supporting various features such as wide-screen signalling, active format descriptors, DVB and EBU subtitles, over-air-download, MHEG-5 and a remote control simulator, Observatory allows full user experience testing combined with real transmission streams from recorded MPEG streams stored on the PC hard disk or other storage devices.

Observatory is supplied as a software development kit (SDK) comprising a Windows implementation of the Cabot Digital TV Suite including the Eclipse DVB middleware, Mercator MHEG-5 engine and Callisto over-air-download module.

A reference multilanguage, pan-European UI supporting DVB-T or DVB-S is also supplied in source, which developers can use within the highly intuitive Microsoft C++ Visual Studio environment to build compelling and branded user interfaces.

Developers can either customise the reference UI or alternatively build a completely new user interface using the powerful TV-ready core graphical components provided in the Eclipse user-interface framework.

Once the UI application has been tested in the Observatory environment, the exact code is recompiled using the target platform tool chain and can be downloaded into the target receiver hardware, further reducing the time to market.