Hybrid electronic program guide application for digital TV receiver

Abstract

Hybrid broadcast-broadband TV (HbbTV) is a global initiative that brings new solutions to world of digital television (DTV) in terms of entertainment. In comparison to previous initiatives, different services are additionally provided in HbbTV. This paper describes an application for displaying of hybrid Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for a digital TV receiver. The application works with and without Internet connection which makes it hybrid. If Internet connection is available, Extensible Markup Language (XML) file which contains the data for populating of EPG will be downloaded from remote server and parsed. Otherwise the required data will be parsed from Event Information Table (EIT) which can be found in MPEG transport stream (TS). Graphics and graphical elements are supported by DirectFB library and downloading of files from the server is implemented using thttpd server and cURL library. The application is modular and consists the following modules: main module, module for parsing of Service Information (SI) and Program-specific information (PSI) tables, module for graphics, module for handling of input from remote controller, module for downloading of the XML file from the server and module for parsing of the XML file to get data required for EPG. By pressing the EPG button on remote controller, the EPG dialog with current TV show will be shown on the screen. The solution proposed in this paper combines different technologies in order to provide robust application for end user.