The Design And Realization Of IPTV Set-Top Box's Software System

IPTV, a more flexible communication method, has its huge influences on the increment of the ISP, ICP and IT service carrier in the future. IPTV has the extremely bright characteristic, may realize the media tender and the media consumer's substantive interaction, it can act according to the user the choice disposition many kinds of multimedia services function, including digital television program, visible IP telephone, DVD/CD broadcast, Internet browsing, receiving and dispatching email as well as many kinds of on-line information consultant, entertainment, education and commercial function. An IPTV service (or technology) is the new convergence service (or technology) of the telecommunication and broadcasting through QoS controlled Broadband Convergence IP Network including wire and wireless for the managed, controlled and secured delivery of a considerable number of multimedia contents such as Video, Audio, data and applications processed by platform to a customer via Television, PDA, Cellular, and Mobile TV terminal with STB module or similar device.In this article, after analyzing the basic definitionand of IPTV set-top box and its present situation home and aboroad, we summarized the IPTV set-top box's service requirements. By studying the service demands as well as thecorrelation documents of IPTV set-top box, we decided the software and hardware environment. For the hardware, we choose ST-7100 supporting H264/VC1 monolithic solution, which is the most optimizated, the most competitived chip system in the present market, to provid the basic functionality support; For the software, as a customer end product, IPTV requires a real-time operation system as well as hardware support to realize the required service functionalities. After considering all the demands, we decided to use STLinux, which uses Linux core with complete memory protection and multi-tasks, multi-threads, to be IPTV set-top box's real-time operating system.Since we have selected the the hardware and RTOS of IPTV set-top box and know the functionalities of IPTV STB, we should design the software system architecture in the light of robustness, portability and scalability. In view of the above requirements for the structural design and realization of software systems, we give a more detailed description of the software system. During the implementation process of IPTV software system, we mainly finish the job with the embedded browser—Dillo. After the analysis Dillo's solution, a combination of Dillo and the designed architecture becomes the implementation of IPTV set-top box software system. In the article, we take the the reality of GUI and Configuration parts as examples to decribe the implementation. For other parts, we just give a brief note.Finally, we design the the test plan of the implemented IPTV software system , and test the whole system.