<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Tortise <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tortise@paradise.net.nz">tortise@paradise.net.nz</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">From: "Aaron Whitehouse" <<a href="mailto:lists@whitehouse.org.nz">lists@whitehouse.org.nz</a>><br></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">
<div>> What sort of application is it? Surely there will be a variety of<br>
> FreeviewHD-approved products out there and they will have to be able to<br>
> deal with updates. <br></div></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">
<br>
</div>While I do not know I have been thinking along the same lines as Aaron, if they make any significant changes there is a heap of<br>
commercial kit that is going to fall over - and there are going to be a heap of upset users complaining about broken commercial<br>
boxes. For example the over the air firmware updates are done in blocks of weeks so they are unlikely to happen overnight for all<br>
commercial users.<br></blockquote><div> </div><div>You're both assuming that the code to build the EPG is in the firmware of the devices. My understanding is that that is not the case. The firmware contains an MHEG parser that knows how to build an application from the MHEG data found in the stream. It's a general purpose thing, basically like a language runtime. The EPG is implemented as MHEG code delivered in the broadcast stream and it is the EPG code that understands the guide data that is also embedded in the stream. So Freeview could, at any time, simply change the data format and update the EPG code that is in the MHEG stream. No need for firmware updates at all.<br>
<br><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">
So while they might be free to make changes, the chances of these happening very often are in my view remote.<br></blockquote><br>
I disagree. Since Firmware updates are not required I think changes are extremely likely. Most likely changes will be driven by increasing functionality but they could simply change things to make it harder to extract the data. And if someone writes a tool to extract the EPG data and the data then gets republished on a website they'd have a good reason to do so.<br>
<br>Cheers,<br>Steve<br></div></div>