The Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) software framework is designed to bring interactive multimedia applications to set top boxes, integrated digital televisions, and multimedia PCs. The framework further specifies the delivery of these applications over broadcast channels such as cable, satellite, or terrestrial television signals. Abstracting these features into one library allows independent implementation of both the engine underneath the API (the MHP Stack) and the applications that utilize it. As 3rd party MHP stacks have become commercially available, developers are now able create robust visual applications without having to implement platform-specific multimedia code.
At runtime, an MHP application utilizes
the MHP API to
invoke various system and rendering operations.
The MHP Stack processes these commands determining how
media should be formatted for display, and how user
interaction should be processed. The MHP
Stack uses the CEE-J Virtual Machine (VM) to translate
these commands into concise instructions that the native
platform understands.
If applications require access to platform specific functionality not already incorporated in the standard Virtual Machine libraries, Skelmir provides both a JNI native interface implementation, as well as a easier to use Skelmir Native Interface (SNI) implementation. Utilizing either of these interfaces requires compiling the native methods into a libraries which are then linked to at the application's runtime.
The Skelmir CEE-J VM has a developed framework that supports 3rd party plug-in MHP stack implementations. This allows CEE-J customers to find the MHP implementation that best meets their particular needs.
Given a CEE-J VM supported platform, any MHP Stack implementation that conforms to the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) MHP specification can be coupled with our VM technology. And because the CEE-J VM has such a small footprint, customers can create MHP environments for devices that may be deemed "too small" by other VM providers.
3rd Party MHP Components
The MHP specification requires a particular set of 3rd party components that, when coupled with our CEE-J VM implementation, provide a software platform that supports the execution of any MHP Xlet. The following resources will aid you in acquiring all 3rd party MHP components:
The default style sheet for DVB HTML pages requires a specific screen font. The company Bitstream provides glyphs for this Tiresias font.
MHP user interface classes are implemented using the Home Audio-Video Interoperability architecture's org.havi.ui class libraries.
The CEE-J VM provides an implementation of the JMF media framework, but it doesn't include native platform multimedia encoders and decoders.
Individual third-party MHP stacks must provide support for DAVIC.
3rd Party MHP Solutions
Stacks have been implemented by numerous 3rd party companies. Any stack implementation that fully conforms to the dvb.org MHP standard can be used with the CEE-J VM. The following are a list of companies that offer MHP stack implementation solutions:
MHP Related Links
Collection of useful MHP related links: