Avalpa Community

MHEG is quite hugely deployed in many countries, actually.

It's quite a consistent environment for doing applications (maybe because there are very very VERY few middleware vendor, please show yourself here..) but a bit "picky" as it's quite a different language concept.

We have developed some applications for customers and as a side product we have made up a demo roll for showing off the potential.

There are a card game and a video on demand application:




We have developed also a pre-processor to help keep out of development those pesky scene numbers, and we'll release freely when it will be more clean (along with the source codes of these apps, but it would be better call them "assembler written"..)

Hello boys,

this is our take on a simple "poor man" processor for making simple MHEG apps creation a little less awkward.
it's not supposed to be a sophisticated tool at all, feel free to have a look and eventually tell us where it could be improved, keeping well in mind that SIMPLICITY is key here. we can believe how bloated can become software when you add fancy features or corner cases (the 20/80 rule always win).

Here few info about this demo setup of a couple of MHEG apps you culd have seen in action in the demo roll:

We take for granted you, the reader, are knowledgeable in DVB/MHEG and aquainted with OpenCaster. right?

In the OpenCaster setup there are two services:
- Avalpa ocdir1, where there's a small MHEG app will show a red button for VOD over MHEG-IC
- Avalpa ocdir2, where there's a MHEG card solitaire, the famous one as it's the most used desktop application on PC!

You can have a look at the source code (what an exaggeration!) solitaire.avmhg and sample-vod.avmhg to check the way they are written. Still resembles a lot the MHEG typical code with some identifiers in place of numbers (like going from byte code to assembler, more or less..)

please read the manual of avmhg-proc.pl if you want to understand how it works.

if you want to modify the application, beware you need to install also the MHEG encoder/decoder for one click straight encoding into the carousel directory.

This is the sample line to "re-assemble" the avmhg application into the ASN1 version:

./avmhg-proc.pl -i sample-vod.avmhg -e ocdir1
./avmhg-proc.pl -i solitaire-vod.avmhg -e ocdir2

if you want to activate some more debug when pressing the Blu button, use:

./avmhg-proc.pl -c d -i sample-vod.avmhg -e ocdir1

if you want to run the carousel, you need to have the OpenCaster package installed and some kind of DVB modulator card. BTW You could purchase the Avalpa Hides bundle to get a great small lite powerful device and fund also further Avalpa open development.

This is how open source is all about!!

Then, to start stream with carousels inside, execute ./start-mheg.sh

Then tune your tv on 802MHz and have a look at the result. Of course we are here listening your complaints..

We are available also for development. So many tv sets are just waiting compelling services..