[Dewayne-Net] Consumer Electronics Prepare To Embrace Linux

[Randy Burge]

Consumer Electronics Prepare To Embrace Linux

  By Christoph Hammerschmidt, EE Times, InternetWeek
  Mar 19, 2004 (4:00 PM)
  URL:  
<http://www.internetweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=18401059>

  HANNOVER, Germany - Consumer electronics companies want to leverage
the trend toward adding value to consumer electronics through
software to create a Linux-based "living room operating system."

  At this week's CeBIT show here, Philips unveiled several reference
designs for media players and other consumer electronics device
platforms. The reference designs have one thing in common: They all
use Philips' own Nexperia media processor. However, the company does
not want to push its own processor, but rather wants to provide a
unified platform for the industry. The new reference designs are
hardware-independent, said Paul de Bot, vice president of business
development at Philips Semiconductor.

  The lion's share of future consumer electronics' technical
development will be software related. "The amount of available
software triples every three years. That means that the software
section can keep up with Moore's Law easily," de Bot said.

  The biggest problem is the extremely fragmented market. "Sharing
software and building up a common software platform is important," de
Bot added. Therefore, Philips will provide software platforms for
home electronics in close corporation with other companies.

  For example, Philips contributes to the Digital Home Working Group,
together with Samsung, Nokia, Intel, Microsoft and other industry
leaders. In February, Philips and Samsung presented the Universal
Home Application Program Interface (UHAPI), a set of joint
application interfaces developed by both companies.

  The interfaces are hardware-independent, and can be implemented in
most processor platforms, said de Bot. Furthermore, the set of
interfaces does not require a certain operating system. He is
confident that Linux will play a key role in the future consumer
electronics products.

  "Linux is the preferred operating system for digital consumer
electronics," de Bot said. "We need to create a community to bring
the coders together. In this field, Linux is the Lingua Franca,
there's no doubt about it. PC coders who work with Linux will be able
to transfer their software to this platform easily."

  Furthermore, some consumers expect more from their equipment than
the average PC can provide. "We need a quick booting operating system
for the living room that is more rugged, needs less memory and
delivers improved, real-time performance compared to today's PC
operating systems," the Philips manager said.

  What kind of applications will run on future systems? "It's not
about applications," said de Bot. "It's about ease of use " what we
need is a common, intuitive user interface." Then, applications will
have to be adapted to the living room.

  Another issue is the specification of the supported data formats.
"This industry does not have a lack of standards, that's not the
point. The problem is that there are so many standards," de Bot said.
Hence, he said it is critical to maintain open standards like MP3,
AAC and MPEG.

  According to de Bot, future of audio and video data formats will
diverge from today's predominant recording methods that compress a
series of samples in the time domain. "The future will bring
parametric methods that [simplify] audio or video signals to their
basic elements . . . and reassemble them when saving or transmitting
the data. That means that you can achieve high-quality signals while
using an extremely low bit rate."

  The new MPEG video codec AVC is an example of the technique.

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