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Case Study

The Open Group > Certification > Test Development Services > Case Study: DVP

Digital Video Broadcasting – Multimedia Home Platform (DVB MHP)

Objectives

The DVB MHP Test Suite is designed to measure conformance of the new generation of Digital Television receivers and set-top boxes. Conformance is attained through consumer electronic manufacturer self-certification and requires test programs to be delivered to the receiver in an automated environment that simulates true broadcast.

The Open Group’s Technical Solution

The Open Group was contracted by the MHP Test Consortium to produce an automated test environment and a variety of test cases, written entirely as Java Xlets as described in the javax.tv extension package. The test cases are written to conform to the DVB MHP 1.0.2 specification, which includes the org.dvb.test package designed by The Open Group’s engineers to automate interactions between the receiver and the test management system.

The test management system controls the insertion of the Java Xlet and associated signalling into the broadcast stream and interacts with the receiver to change broadcast content, issue remote control key presses and capture audio-visual content as and when required by the test case.

Individual test cases determine the conformance of each aspect of the DVB MHP Application Programmer Interface. The tests cover a wide variety of receiver functions including:

• Visual presentation of both moving and still image
• Application life-cycle control from both broadcast signalling and managing applications
• Resource contention management
• Return channel access to ISP resources
• Application security control through X.509 based PKI and content signing
• Tuning and broadcast service selection

Project Outcome

The Open Group staff working on this project produced over 2500 Java test cases running as a fully automated test suite. Many of these test cases have already been included in the initial set of tests which form the basis for the industry standard DVB MHP Conformance Test Suite. We expect other tests to be added in future releases of the test suite as the DVB MHP technology matures.

The Open Group were also contracted to the DVB Project Office to integrate other Java based test contributions to produce a consistent format for the initial version of the DVB Conformance Test Suite. This included test cases from the Sun Java test suite, the MHP Test Consortium and other smaller test suites and the combined test suite is now available from ETSI.

We are now working with Cable Laboratories Inc. to provide a similar conformance test suite for their Open Cable Application Profile, which is expected to define the middleware stack for the next generation of cable host devices.