Multimedia Home Platform
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Multimedia Home Platform (DVB-MHP) is an open middleware system standard designed by the DVB project for interactive digital television. DVB-MHP is used in most of Europe (Finland, France, Germany, Italy, UK...), India and Australia.
MHP 1.0.X specifies an extensive application execution environment for digital interactive TV, independent of the underlying, vendor-specific, hardware and software. This execution environment is based on the use of a Java (tm) virtual machine and the definition of generic APIs that provide access to the interactive digital TV terminal's typical resources and facilities.
MHP applications come in two flavours. The first type are DVB-HTML applications. These are not very popular, partly because the specification for DVB-HTML was only completed with MHP 1.1, and partly because many broadcasters, box manufacturers and content developers find it too complex and difficult to implement. DVB-HTML applications are a set of HTML pages that are broadcast as part of a service. The spec is based around a modularized version of XHTML 1.1, and also includes CSS 2.0, DOM 2.0 and ECMAScript.
The second, and by far the most popular flavour is DVB-J (DVB-Java) applications. These are written in Java using the MHP API set and consist of a set of class files that are broadcast with a service. DVB-Java applications are known as 'Xlets'. These are a concept similar to applets for web pages that has been introduced by Sun in the JavaTV specification. Like applets, the xlet interface allows an external source (the application manager in the case of an MHP receiver) to start and stop an application.
The SetTopBoxes may provide a backchannel for applications that wish to communicate with outside world, for example a voting application. Typical upstream backchannels are modem line or internet connection.
External links
- MHP official standards (http://www.mhp.org/) for interactive television and related interactive home entertainment.
- MHP tutorials (http://www.mhp-interactive.org/)
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