Design And Implementation Of Embedded Browser In Streaming Application Middleware

With the rapid development of the network and multimedia technologies, more and more people enjoy streaming media services through the Internet, which promotes the rapid growth of the domestic industries of digital TV and network video. It becomes a trend to access the web applications that support streaming media functions on the embedded systems, such as mobiles and TVs. The browser is a middleware that gives a runtime environment to the upper layer web applications, which plays a significant role in the streaming media web systems. So it is valuable to develop a cross-platform browser which could connect the web applications and the systematic streaming media functions.There exist two problems in developing the browser on the embedded systems which supports the web applications with streaming media functions. Firstly, it is difficult to transplant the browser to different platforms which have different APIs. Secondly, it is difficult to embed the streaming media functions into web applications.To solve the above two problems, this paper designs a streaming media and web oriented embedded browser, Clear Browser. It provides a solution to combine web applications and streaming media functions, which allows web pages access the pre-defined Javascript object to invoke the functions of the streaming media player. Meanwhile, a Javascript specification of web applications invoking streaming media functions is proposed as well. Since the security and stability of the system may be influenced by the web applications to which the interfaces of the streaming media player are exposed, this paper also provides a solution that combines the state machine and atomic operation to reduce the systematic risks. Furthermore, taken the network packet loss into considered, the paper designs a FEC packet-recovering plugin, which can improve the video quality of streaming media in the packet-loss network.The experimental results show that Clear Browser is a cross-platform, HTML standard supported browser, and could satisfy the demands of common streaming media services in web applications. Now, Clear Browser has been applied into Haier Intelligent TVs and proved to have certain practical value.