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.