Senior Project - capster

Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs), a nonprofit research and development consortium, is dedicated to helping its cable operator members integrate new cable telecommunications technologies into their business objectives. One goal of CableLabs is provide a richer set of set-top box (STB) applications to cable customers by opening development of STB applications to the open-source development community. However, cable STB application programming is difficult for the common programmer to do. Some of the necessary middleware licenses are very expensive. There is a relative lack of resources on the STB, as it has minimal memory, storage, processing power, and access to external facilities such as the internet. Most importantly, the STB is a sensitive software environment and the integrity of the STB cannot be compromised by arbitrary third-party software.

The goal of this project was to allow STB application development to occur on a PC connected to the STB. These applications then communicate to specialized software on the STB to display information to the user and to receive remote control input from the user via a well-defined protocol.

This approach addressed the three problems of STB application development mentioned above. First, development occurs in a standard C# development environment on a typical PC, so no expensive software licenses are required. Second, the PC run-time environment provides considerably improved performance, as well as access to mass storage and other peripherals and to the internet. Finally, since the only new code introduced on the STB itself is carefully controlled by current STB developers, the STB environment remains safe and the STB will not be compromised.