An Open Software Architecture for Multimedia Consumer Terminals

This paper describes the software architecture for multimedia consumer terminals designed within the ACTS project MUSIST. The architecture is developed based on requirements for interactive multimedia terminals for residential customers. A basic solution is first developed which serves low cost consumer terminals (set top boxes) and allows also migration towards powerful multimedia PCs. The base level architecture is compliant to the DAVIC recommendations. A MHEG-5 run-time engine is the core of this architecture and its components and dynamic behaviour are described. The enhancements necessary to be compliant to the recent DAVIC recommendations including Java are discussed. Java's applicability and the impact of its use on low cost consumer terminals is described. It is made evident, that for the current situation a migration towards Java has some drawbacks for the purposes of the project. Based on these considerations, an open architecture is described in order to allow an extension of the capabilities of the consumer terminal towards the processing of new content formats.