Implementación de un Set-Top Box basado en plataformas de hardware de bajo costo

Abstract

Ecuador adopted in 2010 the Digital Television standard known as ISDB-Tb, which has been chosen by many countries in Latin America generating research and development opportunities in a growing field. Therefore, it is important to promote and developt technologies which take advantage of high definition content transmition and also, the chance of improve viewer’s ex-perience through interactive applications.

This emerging field and its associated research opportunities require to analyze di erent hard-ware platforms and software alternatives which allow improving digital television (DTV) pene-tration indexes and coverage. Moreover, aiming to cooperate with the Ecuador’s objective on propitiating a change in the production matrix by locally producing aggregated value products, our work is focused on implementing a DTV signals receiver device, also known as set-top-box STB. This device comprises hardware and software components, able to support what is na-med a middleware layer which enables interactivity. We focus con several topics related to the design and the implementation of a STB based on a low cost and popular platform, including architecture, configuration and testing.

First we present some theoretic principles and a summary of the current situation of DTV in Ecuador, by describing the technical aspects of the ISDB-Tb standard related to signal trans-mission and reception and the STB key components. Later, we propose an evaluation procedure aimed to test the following hardware components: Arduino board, Raspberry Pi and BeagleBo-ne. These platforms are analyzed in detail in order to determine the one that best fits the STB minimum requirements, such that several software components can be tested for compatibility purposes, including Linux based operating systems such as Raspbmc, Raspbian and Ubuntu Mate. This work includes the development of a setup procedure that allows incorporating an ISDB-Tb DTV signal receiver to the selected hardware platform. Finally, a middleware compo-nent is incorporated to the system such that it can be thoroughly evaluated by making use of standard tests. This work shows that indeed a low cost platform based STB can be implemented and evaluated.