The LinuxTV project is an informal group of volunteers who develop software regarding

digital television Digital television (DTV) is the transmission of television signals using digital encoding, in contrast to the earlier analog television technology which used analog signals. At the time of its development it was considered an innovative advanc ...

for the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

-based operating systems. The community develops and maintains the

Digital Video Broadcasting Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a set of international open standards for digital television. DVB standards are maintained by the DVB Project, an international industry consortium, and are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) ...

(DVB) driver subsystem which is part of the Linux kernel since version 2.6.x. The Linux kernel and the LinuxTV CVS include a fair number of drivers for commonly available PCI cards and USB devices, but the DVB subsystem core is also targeted towards

set-top boxes A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...

which run some (embedded) Linux. The LinuxTV project was originally initiated by the

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

based company Convergence Integrated Media GmbH with the goal to distribute free and

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

software for the production, distribution and reception of digital television. In 1998, the Convergence founders claimed that "Only the access to the source code of our future television sets will guarantee the independence of content and technology". After some financial troubles, in 2002 Convergence had been taken over by the German

set top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...

manufacturer Galaxis AG, and renamed to Convergence GmbH. Although both Convergence GmbH and Galaxis AG went bankrupt in 2005, the LinuxTV project lives on independently, being supported by the large developer community that had gathered around the project over the years. Another significant Convergence development is

DirectFB DirectFB (Direct Frame Buffer) is a software library with a small memory footprint that provides graphics acceleration, input device handling and abstraction layer, and integrated windowing system with support for translucent windows and mult ...

, a thin library that provides hardware graphics acceleration and windowing features for

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprie ...

-based and other graphical Linux applications without the use of

X.Org Server X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation. Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of ''X11 libraries'', which serve a ...

, and which its developers claim "adds graphical power to embedded systems".

References

External links

*
DVB-Wiki

Sunray Linux DVB receiver
Free television software Set-top box Software that uses GTK Television organizations {{linux-stub

See also

References

External links