Embedded Flash Player Research

At present, the digitization of television network is being vigorously promoted by the government, and tens of millions of Set-Top Boxes have come into people's home. With continuous innovation and development of the technology, and the inevitable trend of integration of communication networks, computer networks and Cable TV networks, Set-Top box is developing from a simple tuner and decoder toward a network multimedia terminal with rich functions. Therefore, more and more multimedia formats in addition to digital television signals should be supported by Set-Top Boxes, and some high-end products which supporting MP3, RMVB or some other audio formats have already emerged. The Flash animation is the most popular multi-media format on Internet, but due to some technical difficulties, there are still no Set-Top Boxes which can play Flash animations at this moment.In this paper, an embedded flash player is designed and implemented for Set-Top Boxes. First, the principles of vector animation are introduced and the format of flash files is analyzed. And then the software framework and the running process are designed. After that, some core sub-modules are implemented, the focus and difficulty of which is vector graphics rendering module and ActionScript engine.Due to the problem that it is too time-consuming to render vector graphics on embedded platform, a bitmap caching mechanism is proposed and implemented which largely increases the playing speed and solves that key problem.Based on the successful development of embedded flash player, a man-machine interactive system based on flash is designed for the Set-Top Box. Compared with the UI of traditional set-top box, the advantages of the new system is apparent that it improves user's visual experience and it is also easier to transplant and update.The successful development of embedded flash player has further expanded multimedia functions of Set-Top Boxes, and also provided a new technology for operators to develop value-added services.