MHEG-5 engine meets latest digital TV specs

Due for launch next week at Mediacast 2004, the Mercator MHEG-5 engine conforms to the latest v1.06 MHEG-5 interactive standard for the UK digital TV market.

Due for launch next week at Mediacast 2004, the Mercator MHEG-5 engine conforms to the latest v1.06 MHEG-5 interactive standard for the UK digital TV market.

The latest version of Mercator is significantly faster than its previous incarnation with a smaller memory footprint, maintaining Cabot's industry-leadership position.

It allows STB and iDTV manufacturers to remain cost-effective while providing support for enhanced Freeview interactive services, such as BBCi and Teletext.

The Mercator MHEG-5 engine, supplied as a software development kit (SDK) with mature programming interfaces and comprehensive porting documentation, enables STB and iDTV manufacturers to add digital interactivity support to their Freeview receivers within very competitive timescales.

Keith Potter, Managing Director of Cabot Communications comments: "With over 1.5 million deployments in the UK for the Cabot MHEG-5 engine Mercator, Cabot has played a leading role in the development of the new specification".

"We have been directly involved in the specification process of the MHEG v1.06 profile and have significantly contributed to the development of the associated DTG MHEG test suite".

"The new conformance test requirements from the DTG are much more rigorous than for the previous MHEG-5 v1.05 generation, which means that weaker, less compliant MHEG-5 engines will have their deficiencies highlighted before they go to market".

Cabot has invested over 2 man-years extending Mercator to enable our customer base of over 20 OEMs to support the latest digital TV interactive standards." The original MHEG-5 v1.06 specification was released in 2003 and the new DTG MHEG-5 Test Suite from the Digital Television Group (DTG) is now in its final stages of development.

MHEG-5 v1.06 is an evolution of the mass-deployed v1.05 specification, which makes application authoring more efficient and allows broadcasters to provide richer and more transparent interactive applications.

MHEG v1.06 aims to form a baseline specification for future interactive implementations ensuring that receivers conform to the new standards in the UK DTT market.

In particular it ensures that interoperability issues are kept to a minimum, guaranteeing consistency of interactive applications for content providers, across all receiver platforms.

Other features of Mercator include: an independent consultancy benchmarked Mercator as on average 40% faster on rendering MHEG-5 content than its nearest competitor; Mercator was designed as an embedded implementation, thus ensuring fast and memory efficient operation in the resource-constrained environment of low-cost receivers; Mercator includes a standardised API and adaptation layer called CHIL (Cabot high-level interface layer) which is designed to be portable to different DVB middleware stacks, real-time operating systems and is architecture independent; and Mercator is pre-integrated into Cabot's Eclipse DVB Middleware, supporting pan-European digital terrestrial and satellite receivers.

STB and iDTV manufacturers will have the choice to upgrade their existing boxes in the field with an over-the-air download (OAD) software upgrade or to introduce new receivers with the updated MHEG-5 v1.06 into the market.

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