A flexible and efficient UI development environment

Observatory is a powerful Windows development environment which enables manufacturers to build, test and simulate customised DVB software applications within previously unachievable timescales.  Observatory represents a major advancement from traditional graphical non-coding tools.  With far greater coding efficiency, the Visual C++ environment gives developers the flexibility to design, build and modify industry-leading UIs in extremely short periods of time.  Observatory also significantly shortens manufacturers’ dependency on hardware platform availability as the entire application can be developed within the Windows environment before final testing on the receiver hardware.  This offers a crucial advantage when speed to market is a high priority.

Rapid prototyping of customised User Interfaces

Most manufacturers have very specific branding and interaction requirements for UIs.  Observatory meets these needs with a totally comprehensive emulation of a DVB receiver in a PC environment.  By supporting rapid prototyping and testing of new applications in a realistic DVB environment, Observatory dramatically reduces the development time of complex, customised UIs.  In addition, Observatory further speeds up development with accurate simulation of the video and On Screen Display (OSD) planes through:

• Supporting precise scaling and positioning of media content

• Perfect colour blending of the OSD with the video plane

• Video content can be configured to contain images from the transport stream or stills, allowing precise examination of the transparency level of individual OSD pixels

• In addition, DVR functionality can be simulated by making recordings to the PCs hard disk

Comprehensive testing of interactive functionality and transport streams

To ensure interactive applications are fully compatible with the rest of the receiver interface, Observatory supports the Mercator MHEG- 5 plug-in and includes a remote control simulator so that real consumer interactions can be tested within a Windows environment.  To provide a genuine DVB experience, Observatory also supports processing of recorded DVB MPEG Transport Streams (ISO 13818) at real-time speed from the hard disk.  Pan-European receiver testing is also simplified as Observatory can support multiple European streams.  For example, the behaviour of border conditions can be simulated by placing two different network streams on the PC hard-disk.

Observatory enhancements

In order to support manufacturers who need to create differentiated UIs within the shortest possible product development timescales, Cabot Communications have developed a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) processing module.  The features of the SVG processing module will enable visual UI changes to be made by graphical designers instead of software engineers, effectively freeing up precious engineering resources.  With SVG, manufacturers will be able to provide new UI designs and their SVG definitions so that they can be easily integrated to applications with minimal time and effort.  In addition, SVG enables graphical designers to easily see how their design looks on the resultant application through Cabot’s dynamic SVG simulator ‘Designer Observatory’ which provides an instant UI visualisation.  

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