An extensible set-top box platform for home media applications

The number of different types of devices on the home network is expanding greatly. While this explosion of innovation provides compelling new devices to consumers, it problems with ensuring compatibility among these devices, and providing a useful overall user interface for them. This paper describes an experimental set-top box platform for home media applications. The key feature of this platform is that it can dynamically exchange code with other devices on the home network, allowing it to not only acquire new capabilities at runtime, but also provide new capabilities to peer devices on the network. These new capabilities can take the form of new data transmission protocols, CODECs, or user interfaces. We describe the underlying architecture of our platform, as well as the user interface that allows control over a variety of home devices.