[linux-dvb] GPLed MHP DVB solution.. (alpha!)

[Andrea Venturi <a.venturi@cineca.it>]

hi,

i work in a small workgroup developing a core solution to deploy a DVB 
solution for interactive digital TV broadcasters.

in italy, there is an increasing interest in DVB because we are in the 
middle of the switch from analog to digital terrestrial television.

the focus in italy is toward an interactive (aka MHP) digital tv.

we, as cineca, are planning to act as a service provider for traditional
broadcasters to enhance with interactive applications their basic 
service (expecially PA applications).

we are a newcomer in television services and have no asset there  but we 
come from a long tradition of IT services and actually we are well on 
the path of the open source higher quality and modularity value 
proposition..

so, we thought that interactive digital tv (from the broadcaster side of 
the story) could be the next big thing for the open source community!

growing on some well done basic tools like dvbsnoop, projectx, libdsmcc,
dvbstream, and others (sorry to miss here the right recognition!) we 
began to plan a simple dvb lab to test MHP applications.

we bought a DVB-T modulator and..

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and worked hard for a couple of month (but it has been quite fun!)

and now, today, we are launching our GPLed alpha state prototype to test
MHP applications, something that (we hope) will evolve in a fully 
fledged modular carousel server (and more!).

the name of the project is JustDVB-IT !

the home page is:

 http://krusty.cineca.it/vpweb/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/

where you should find some informations, a la blog:

- all the news about the project
- a simple demo ts, a popular promo used to introduce interactive
digital tv to italian people!
- a simple demo MHP application (a game like quadra http://quadra.sf.net)
- the package JustDVB-IT-0.2.tgz

if you untar all this stuff, you'll get:
- all the overmentioned projects "freezed" to the version we used at the
time of the packaging (a way we hope to reduce the number of variables)
- a lot of simple tools able to create/modify a number of system table
of a transport stream flowing along
- a directory cindemo with a script "start.sh" quite readable where all
those tools are piped in the right way to test them

as usual, there are tons of things to change, improve, comment and so on..

but we believe many people could be interested in this project, some 
mails some time ago were about dvb headend, this _could_ be the starting 
point!

actually this is NOT a lot of things:
- no soft mux of SCTS,
- no ip encapsulator (but this is going to be done soon!)
- no teletext
- no EPG
- no fancy system tablea
- no pay per view
- no CSA support
- no OTA upgrade service

..and does NOT do a lot of things:
- no documentation
- no easy configuration
- no web interface
- no monitoring
- no high availability

today just plain simple MHP apps are inserted on a TS!

and, BTW, we dont support actually multimedia streams and many many
other features of the MHP standard..

BUT we hope to add every features we need, that is cool and/or could be
funded by external parties ;-) !

so this is GPL, will be GPL, take it, use it, modify it and let it live
an happy GPL life.

let us know what you think about it.

bye

andrea venturi