Working on an InternetTV decoder

During the last month I have been working again at the university of Urbino, on a project that involves other two graduates of the Computer Science faculty, Andrea and Saverio. The objective, for now, is to build an embedded InternetTV decoder which should work like a low power set-top-box able to reproduce digital HD video.

The project was presented yesterday at a conference here in Urbino about the future of television (i.e. InternetTV, of course, which is slowly taking hold here in the old continent). A representative from StreamIt attended, the main partner and most promising content provider in Italy.

Our set-top-box is being developed on a Beagleboard, a quite cheap board powered by a Texas Instruments OMAP 3530 processor which also includes a dedicated DSP chip particularly suited to decode multimedia streams. On the software side, the board is running on Ångström (a Linux flavor) and we have been implementing an RTMP client (the Adobe / Flash streaming protocol) and a player (based on GStreamer + QT + Mono). That's a lot of topics I'd like to blog about if I ever find some time.

Anyway, in the past days we had some euphoric moments when suddendly we were able to decode some largish videos (not HD, but still) using the DSP and with a CPU load of ~15%. After weeks of banging our collective heads against the board...

Watch on Vimeo.