The Design Of Internet Multimedia Software Platform For Smart TV And The Implementation Of Some Key Technologies

It is predicted by the Gartner (the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company) that85%of all flat-panel TVs will be Internet-connected smart TVs by2016. This implies that smart TV will be the lead of global TV markets in the future. Among the factors which can impact the competitiveness of different smart TV products, operating system is the most important one from software perspective. Currently, different smart TV manufacturers develop different software platforms which can be integrated with embedded Linux kernel or Android to provide their own smart TV operating systems. However there are some problems with these software platforms such as non-uniform standards of APIs and poor compatibility. These problems increase a lot of work to re-implement applications on other hardware chips. Therefore it is necessary to develop a standard and general software platform for smart TVs. This platform is supposed to provide a general smart TV operating system solution for different smart TV manufacturers which use their own hardware chips. This platform can provide standard APIs of common functions extracted from mainstream applications on smart TVs.The mainstream applications on smart TVs are Internet multimedia applications such as streaming-media services and multimedia display services. These applications often require high quality of services (high bitrate and low delay) and diversity (diverse media data types and encoding formats). Furthermore smart TV devices have characteristics like limited computing resources and ensured bandwidths. Therefore, the general software platform for smart TV needs to provide functions like QoS assurance according to the requirements of applications, network and hardware. Existing platforms designed for multimedia applications are not suitable for smart TVs because they don’t meet these requirements.Aiming at these problems, this paper proposes an Internet multimedia software platform for smart TV (STVMP). It can support applications including multimedia display systems and streaming-media services. It can optimize the decoding and rendering of multimedia by using hardware application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) in hardware chips while shield the heterogeneity of diverse ASICs. It can use few computing resources to ensure the high quality of services. This paper has the following contributions:1) It gives the detailed design of STVMP. Experiments show that STVMP can support many mainstream Internet multimedia applications and has the characteristic of cross platform. Some contrast experiments also show it can use few computing resources to support applications with high quality of services.2) It gives the design and implementation of the multimedia presentation engine which is the key technology in STVMP to support multimedia display. UI design, structure module and algorithms are introduced. Experiments show this engine has rich display effects and low computing resource requirements.