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 signal, digital encoding, in contrast to the earlier analog television technology which used analog signals. At the time of its development it was considered an ...

for the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

-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) o ...

(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 known as a cable box, receiver, or simply box, and historically television decoder or a converter, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV tuner input and displays output to a television set, t ...

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

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

based company Convergence Integrated Media

GmbH (; ) is a type of Juridical person, legal entity in German-speaking countries. It is equivalent to a (Sàrl) in the Romandy, French-speaking region of Switzerland and to a (Sagl) in the Ticino, Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. It is a ...

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 and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

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 known as a cable box, receiver, or simply box, and historically television decoder or a converter, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV tuner input and displays output to a television set, tur ...

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), now continued as DirectFB2, 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 ...

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

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free software 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 proprietary s ...

-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 (X11) 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 ...

, 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