Available as part of the Aurora DVB complete middleware solution or as a MHEG-5 plug-in, Mercator has been designed and tested to enable manufacturers to include the very latest MHEG-5 functionality in their products in the shortest possible time scales.

Easy integration for shortened product development time

Integrating an MHEG-5 engine into an existing DVB software implementation requires substantial changes to be made to the middleware stack.  The lengthy development times involved often mean that products ultimately reach the market at a higher price and at a later date than the manufacturers had been targeting, missing their market window.  Mercator solves this problem by providing standardised interfaces and components, allowing easy integration and substantially reducing engineering time and effort. 

Mercator is fully portable and includes many features which enable it to be integrated with other DVB cores with minimal time and effort.  Its easy integration features include:

• A software development kit, utilising C++ programming language

• A well documented, standardised Application Programme Interface (API)

• An adaptation layer called CHIL (Cabot High-Level Interface Layer)

• Market-leading porting guides and support services

A future proof MHEG-5 engine

As part of Cabot’s continuous technological development programme, Cabot regularly contributes to leading industry initiatives and programmes which help to drive the development of the digital television industry. Through Cabot’s contributions to the Impala initiative and the Digital Television Group’s (DTG) MHEG-5 UK Profile v1.06 test suite, Cabot has developed a future proof method for manufacturers to continuously and seamlessly keep pace with the evolving MHEG standard.  This significantly reduces manufacturers’ costs both in introducing new products to market and in maintaining existing product lines.  In addition, Cabot continuously extends Mercator's country support, which now includes New Zealand.

A high quality user experience

In order to meet viewers’ high expectations for instant reactivity from their digital TV devices, Mercator was designed from the ground-up for the lower power processors and small memory footprints used in cost efficient receivers.  This ensures both fast and memory efficient operation even in resource constrained environments.

As the Mercator MHEG-5 engine has been designed as a consumer embedded product, it provides the fastest possible user interaction speeds for the highest quality, most responsive viewing experience.  Furthermore, Mercator has been extensively tested to provide a reliable, stable and robust service which consumers can trust.

For further information regarding this, or any other Cabot solution, please contact us.