Netherlands software house Metrological Media Innovations and 2L International, the company behind the Conceptronic consumer electronics brand out of the Netherlands and Spain, say they will be the first to adopt the Intel 3100 chip, the system on a chip which we expect will dramatically lower the price of internet connected TV sets.
While the two are not exactly announcing a product, what they appear to be delivering is a reference design made up of the Intel chip, Metrological’s Mediaconnect TV software, now both expected to radically alter the Conceptronic product range.
The Linux based Mediaconnect TV can sit on pretty much anything and the reference design can apply to digital terrestrial TV sets, set tops for cable, satellite and IPTV as well as Internet only connected devices.
The first such Conceptronic device will be shown at the Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan in June.
A Samsung TV set using it was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January but as far as we know has still to be delivered, and probably both products are waiting for chips to go into volume in the next two months.
The CE 3100 is based on the Intel Architecture, has a high-performance processor core, integrated graphics, hardware codec support, I/O and other units on a single chip. It is nothing like a PC chip even if the instruction set of the core is the same (a 800MHz+ Intel Pentium M processor built in 90 nm) and is a completely new direction for Intel. It has been designed to work with the Yahoo Widget interface for controlling internet content on TV sets.
Intel said at the launch that it can handle two concurrent HD streams and will decode Microsoft’s VC1 video, H.264, MPEG2 and added DiVX and Adobe Flash Video support at the CES in January. Intel is bidding to make the CE 3100 the cheap de facto way to get internet video to a TV set.
Metrological says that its Mediaconnect TV software supports DLNA, which is the first specification of the Digital Living Network Alliance, which lists standards needed to work together and how they attach, to create a multi-room digital home. The DLNA is backed by a number of the biggest suppliers in the consumer electronics world and has Intel as one of the 18 voting members.
SL International says that any devices made with the chip can be connected to the Internet through either wired Ethernet or wireless via 802.11n and for home servers based on the chips, storage up to 2Terabytes can be supported, as can dual DVB-T tuners.
The companies say the framework has Application Programming Interfaces for media players, webcam, local or USB storage and EPG. The framework can use up to four hardware optimised graphical layers. The layers support a resolution up to 1080p full High-Definition on HDMI 1.3a.
Additional features such as internal hard drives, integrated wireless 802.11n, and SD card readers, IR for remote control and Bluetooth
to connect a mouse, keyboard or remote control can all be offered on products built around the reference platform. Expect all of these features to turn up in SL’s Conceptronic Grab’n’GO and Abbrazzio products lines before year end.