Providing DTV Play's Services with a Multimedia Processing Stack Based on GStreamer

• Published in: Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Electronics pp. 1 - 5
• Main Authors: Pinheiro, Claudio, Kimura, Petrina, Machado, Hayde, Oliveira, Sergillam, Silva, Alexandre, Fabricio, Romulo, De Lima Filho, Eddie, Pereira, Elyervesson, Lima, Icaro
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 06.01.2024
• Subjects: Computer architecture; Digital TV; DTV Play; GStreamer; Media; Middleware; multimedia processing stack; Receivers; Streaming media
• ISSN: 2158-4001
• DOI: 10.1109/ICCE59016.2024.10444389

Television (TV) receivers are among the most popular consumer electronics devices present in households around the world. Traditionally, they are focused on providing entertainment using the multimedia content sent in radiofrequency channels, which mainly involves audio, video, and closed caption. Over the years, analog TV became digital, with digital generation and transmission infrastructures, at the transmitting end, and devices capable of processing digital information, at the receiving end, which gave rise to the digital TV (DTV) environment. Moreover, receivers were further enhanced with other features, such as smart modes and middleware modules able to run interactive applications. The latter bear multimedia content to enrich what is sent in DTV channels, providing a way for users to interact with the base programming. However, recent updates related to middleware standards brought new features that profoundly affect the required multimedia processing infrastructure, which is the case of the Brazilian DTV middleware: services offered through representation state transfer application programming interfaces, adaptive streaming, media-chunk-oriented decoding, and encrypted content. Such needs required a new and more sophisticated multimedia stack. However, instead of creating an entirely new entity, we propose an architecture based on an existing multimedia processing module known as GStreamer, which is free and open-source software subject to the terms of LGPL 2.1. We have carried out a real implementation of this infrastructure and discussed some aspects of it. The goal is to provide a usable architecture, guidance regarding resources for service provision, and insights related to the needs of DTV environments.