An Open Platform for Multimedia Entertainment Systems
Today home entertainment appliances are usually based on closed,
proprietary hardware and software design supporting only a limited set
of media types, stream formats, and entertainment options. With the
availability of cheap, small, quiet, and powerful multimedia PCs, it
is now possible to create an open and extensible PC-based platform for
multimedia home entertainment. Based on a new multimedia middleware
for Linux, we describe the design of a simple, and extensible
application and user interface framework. We have used this framework
to create a home entertainment application that currently supports
playing CDs, MP3s, DVDs, grabbing CDs, as well as watching digital and
analog TV with time-shifting.