Currently, Samsung provides the SDK to only register CPs. The current number of CPs is 200 and there are about 80 applications in application store. Those numbers will increase as time goes. It recently announced the SAMSUNG APPS CONTEST 2010, calling developers to use their SDK and create new applications for TV.

Any developer who wants to create applications can

• download the SDK from http://www.pavv.co.kr/contest/,
• make their own application
• test it using an desktop emulator.

Developers can make applications using  Web technologies (HTML and JavaScript) and ADOBE FLASH Technology.

Hope this starts a new era of TV Apps using Flash Lite for Digital Home.

This device has several new menus with a very rich UI:

• TiVo Central
• TiVo Search
• Tivo Browser (Tivo Content Browsing, not a html browser)
• My Shows etc

Apart from this, the Remote is pretty exciting with QWERTY Keyboard and very much like the way needed to navigate different Applications.

Way to go Flash Lite for Digital Home...

The CE4100 will be available at speeds of up to 1.2 GHz, and will feature hardware-based decoding capabilities that can handle two 1080p video streams simultaneously, along with high-definition audio and 3D graphics. The system supports hardware-based decoding for MEG4, and integrated NAND flash controller, support for DDR2 and DDR3 memory, support for SATA-300 and USB 2.0, and 512K of L2 cache. The chip will support Flash Player 10, along with standards like OpenFGL ES 2.0 for developing media-intensive 3D applications; Adobe expects Flash 10 to be available for Sodaville devices in mid-2010.

Dale Rankine talks more about what exactly FlashLite for Digital Home is, its Limitations, Best Practices, Capabilities etc. in this video.

This video will help us in understanding what FlashLite for Digital Home is!!!!

Check it out....

In this post, we are going to talk about using cacheAsBitmap feature effectively while creating content for Set-top boxes.

FlashLite for Digital Home basically has a capability of Hardware Rendering, wherein the hardware has can render the Bitmaps avoiding the software(FlashLite) to take this burden. This results in increase in performance while rendering on set-top box.

Inorder to make make any vector on Stage to bitmap, we can use cacheAsBitmap property of that movieClip.

MovieClip.cacheAsBitmap = true;

Once this property is set to true, that movieClip will be converted to bitmap. So, while rendering it, hardware can take care of rendering this bitmap.

Applicable

This property is only applicable to MovieClips. Its not applicable to Buttons.

Enabling cacheAsBitmap

We can enable cacheAsBitmap either through actionscript or from Flash Authoring.

As explained above, using actionscript you can set the value of this property to true. By default, it will be false.

MovieClip.cacheAsBitmap = true;

In Flash Authoring, there will be a checkbox 'cache as bitmap' under Display panel of Properties menu.

opaqueBackground

In order to see a good improvement in the performance of your content on set-top box, you can use property of MovieClip opaqueBackground along with cacheAsBitmap.

In case of any non-rectangular movieclips, say a cirle, if you see the bounding box of that movieclip (which is a square), there are some parts which are transparent other than the circular fill. Rendering this transparent regions will be a bit overhead to FlashLite. The opaqueBackground property will fill these transparent areas of the movieclip with a specific color.

MovieClip.opaqueBackground = 0 //Fills the transparent regions with BLACK color

In your content, if your stage color is black, assigning the opaquBackground to black wont change its appearence. Using this we are removing the trasparent regions of the movieclip.

This will be in handy, while assigning the same color of your stage as opaqueBackground  for all non-rectangular movieClips. This wont change the appearance of the movieClips either. Further you can see the improvement in performance.

Things to do:

• Use cacheAsBitmap on movieClips which have a very large vector data.
• Use this for text, as text will have a very large transparent areas.
• Can apply to the content which translates across the stage w/o any change in its content
• Apply on a content which scales w/o change in its content

Things to avoid:

• Try to avoid using many bitmaps in your app, as it will increase the size of your app.
• Try to avoid larger bitmaps, as they occupy more memory.
• It will be an over-head if you use a very large number of bitmaps. This might result in higher memory consumption.
• Donot use on rotating MovieClips.
• Applying cacheAsBitmap on video.

Hope you find this useful...

This is the product i am working on

Good to see demos of the product for which i am working on...

Check out more details here