Hacking the Neuros Set-Top Box

Neuros and Texas Instruments have partnered to produce an open source platform for, and product line of, next generation set-top boxes. These networked embedded devices can record from a variety of sources and playback multimedia files, including high definition video. Incorporating contributions from a variety of communities, including its own Neuros community, the platform is constantly evolving and aspires to converge many of the devices currently occupying the entertainment and fulfill the vision of the media center, but with the advantages of an embedded device (inexpensive, silent, small, low power consumption)

This tutorial will talk about the similarities and differences for developing for an embedded platform relative to a PC, and will walk through the architecture and applications on the device, and demonstrate tools used on the device.

The platform is based on the Davinci series of processors from Texas Instruments and uses contributions from VLC and others to form the framework.

Although the tutorial will focus on the Neuros device, the introduction will be broadly applicable to embedded devices generally, and also give an introduction to a broadly used PC based multimedia framework.