SVG Electronic Program Guides

Cyril Concolato
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With the development of convergent video codecs such as MPEG-4 AVC|H.264, it is now possible to view television progams on many types of devices, including mobile devices (e.g. iPhone). However, given the high number of available television programs, electronic program guides are required. There are many ways to provide electronic program guides applications on mobile devices. One way is to develop and deploy new native applications on each of the mobile plateforms (e.g. iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile). Another way is to rely on convergent Web standards such as SVG to leverage already deployed browsers. Following this second way, this paper presents the results of some investigations and experiments for the display of EPG data using SVG. In particular, we investigated different ways to generate and deliver EPG data. One traditional approach uses AJAX and SVG. On the client, some Javascript code pulls some XML representing the EPG data from a server and converts it into presentable SVG. Another approach consists in directly streaming SVG data, using 3GPP DIMS RTP format, to the client. We report on those two approaches showing the benefits and drawbacks of each. Finally, we demonstrate the EPG application on different clients such as PC equiped with GPAC or Opera, iPhone using Safari.