A comparative analysis of media processing component implementations for the Brazilian digital TV middleware

In the Brazilian Digital Television System (SBTVD) two environments are defined, the procedural and the declarative one, which run simultaneously in the same middleware. The procedural environment is called GingaJ and uses the Sun Java language, while the declarative one is called GingaNCL and it is based on the Nested Context Language (NCL). These two environments compose the Ginga middleware. Nowadays, there is not a single middleware which provides support for both GingaJ and GingaNCL environments. For this reason, the Ginga Code Development Network (GingaCDN) was created to design and provide a complete, tested, integrated and componentized reference version of the middleware. Thus, a common core, named Ginga Common Core (GingaCC) is being developed to provide support for both environments. Solutions are being investigated for the media processing, one of the main GingaCC components, responsible to decode video, audio and subtitles streams. In this work, two media processing implementations are presented, one based on libVLC library and other based on Xine, in order to explore different solutions. This paper discusses both implementations and compares its efficiency through experiments using different computer architectures. Keywords-Middleware; digital TV; Ginga; Media processing; libvlc.