HbbTV Support

[LorbusChris]

Hello Everyone! HbbTV support is something I'd really like to see in SageTV. I'm neither sure how much effort it would be to implement, whether this is even a wanted feature by any one of you nor will I be able to work on this any time soon. So please feel free to close this, if it doesn't fit in with SageTV's plans for the future. Otherwise leave it open for other motivated devs to see there's at least one guy who'd be happy to have it. Thanks for going open source btw :)

Cheers, Chris

[CraziFuzzy]

Is there even a hbbTV standard implementation? In my observation, the (VERY) few services out there all roll their own implementation of the concept.

[LorbusChris]

I found this: http://fmtvp.github.io/tal/faq.html I'm on my phone right now, but I'll do a more through search later today PS. I accidentaly hit the close button on the mobile page nvmd that.

[LorbusChris]

I didnt find anything viable neither. But I found these guys: @louaybassbouss @barroco @mitxp @petrkutalek Sorry I'm mentioning you here in a such a shameless manner, but it seems to me you could elaborate on this topic in one way or the other:

As far as I can tell SageTV would have to act as a HbbTV Terminal (which would be implemented using WebKit or an aquivalent).

I read somewhere on the web, that the HbbTV Forum/EBU is planning to release a reference implementation for testing in the future. This would certainly be helpful. Maybe one of you knows more about this? It would certainly help advance the standard, if there is an open source implemention of this around.

Thanks for participating, and again sorry if you feel this is not your turf. Chris

[mitxp]

Hi,

HbbTV is a standard for itneractive TV, which is adopted by all major TV manufacturers (Samsung, LG, Sony, Panasonic, TP Vision and many more) as well as by STB manufacturers. It allows broadcasters to make interactive TV independently from a manufacturer. This means that the HbbTV services out there are usually rolled out NOT in combination with any specific device.

Now, a lot of major players make their own implementation based on Webkit, but also Opera is very common, as they already have an HbbTV browser ready for adoption to your middleware.

As far as I know, there will be no HbbTV reference implementation. I assume you're talking about the official HbbTV test suite.

[mitxp]

But please be aware that implementing HbbTV is a major project which usually consumes multiple man-years.

[barroco]

Hi All,

Please contact Peter MacAvock if you want more details about the test suite for HbbTV implementations (No reference implementation as far as I know but he may have more information).

macavock@ebu.ch

Kind regards,

Michael

[louaybassbouss]

Hi all,

HbbTV published this year the new 2.0 version of HbbTV 1 which adds new features to the older versions 1.x. The new features are summarised in 2. One of the new features is Companion Screen (CS) support. This feature allows a CS App running on a phone or tablet to discover HbbTV Terminals, Launch a HbbTV App on the TV (using DIAL) and open an App2App communication channel between both Apps (using WebSocket). A HbbTV App running on the TV can also discover companion devices and launch companion applications (Web or Native) on them. First TVs with HbbTV 2.0 support are expected next year. We provide in the node-hbbtv project which is available on GitHub 3 and npm 4 an implementation of the CS features to allow developers and broadcasters to early experiment with applications using HbbTV companion screen. We also provide a HbbTV Cordova Plugin (GitHub 5, npm 6) that implements only the client part (for now supports only Android). Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Thx, Louay