The Design And Implementation Of A GStreamer-based Multimedia Playback System With Set Top Box

With the high development of large scale integrated circuit and digital signal processingtechnology, the field of broadcasting TV is facing a new revolution, and our country hasentered the era from analog TV to digital TV. The Set top box(STB), which is an importantpart of this revolution, makes people can easily watch digital TV programs in the currenttelevision. There are important meaning for promoting economic development with thepopularity of STB. At the same time, with the development and popularization of STB, theuser’s requirements of multimedia playing function on the STB is also becoming more andmore clear. People hope that STB will be a multimedia playing terminal, which can play localmedia or network media source. So building a multimedia playback system in current STBwill become more important and urgent.GStreamer is an open source framework for creating multimedia applications on Linuxplatform. It can greatly simplify the development of STB multimedia playback system, and beeasily applied in the STB platform which use of different chips and based on Linux system.GStreamer ended the chaotic situation of multimedia framework on Linux system, and makethe developers to develop their multimedia playback system easily. In addition to handingaudio and video data, GStreamer can handle other streaming media data. The designing ofpipeline even can be used to design a high demand for audio applications. Its filter almost hasno load in practical using.Currently the major STB chip manufacturers has different methods for multimediasystem. GStreamer is a open source multimedia framework from Linux system, so it has an unparalleled advantage. It is powerful and universal, and provides more options andpossibilities for many STB manufactures developping embedded multimedia playback system.GStreamer can mask differences STB chip platform, making STB manufacturers’smiddleware and upper logic code more be reused. At the same time, it make every chipcompany providing standard interfaces to customers, in order to help STB manufacturersachieve their multimedia playback system, without concerning about the differences betweendifferent chip platform.From the above, this paper will create a STB multimedia playback system which is basedon Linux system, GStreamer framework, and Huaya’s HTV900H chip. We are starting withthe demand of STB multimedia playbcak system, combining with the framework ofGStreamer, creating our audio, video and subtitles plug-ins. And then, we register theseplug-ins to GStreamer. Then implement the GStreamer API, and integration with externalsystems, and ultimately complete STB multimedia playback system which are based onGStreamer framework.This thesis has mainly completed the following researching tasks:1. Depth study of GStreamer multimedia framework and main components.2. Research GStreamer plug-in mechanism, creating audio, video and subtitles plug-inswhich are based on Huaya HTV900H chip.3. Detailed description of the method of system integration for GStreamer, debuggingmethods, and invocation mechanism.4. Create a STB multimedia playback system based on GStreamer, and do associatedtest.5. Discuss the success and shortcomings of this topic, and suggest further improvementof direction and goals.