Samsung’s Hybrid boradcast broadband TV (HbbTV) media player has now taken the open source path which the company announced in a press release earlier today. The project is available on GitHub as HbbPlayer and app developers as well as broadcasters can utilize it to test their services on any HbbTV 1.5 compliant TV which most of Samsung’s smart TVs are.
The HbbTV standard has been around for a while now and the HbbTV consortium have been hard at work to make the platform completely open and target multiple sources of media consumption like smart TVs, ott and set top boxes and other multiscreen devices. The HbbPlayer will help developers to get their code up with less hurdles to overcome and make it fully inter-operable between target devices.
The HbbPlayer project will be evolving with time and Samsung mentioned that down the line it will also meet the HbbTV 2.0.1 requirements and support DVB-DASH streaming for both live and vod content. The future upgrade will also feature advanced controls like trick play control and time shift apart from supporting HTTP progressive download.
Later this year, the HbbPlayer is slated to add support for the HbbTV subtitling for DASH-based content, known as EBU-TT-D. This will allow developers the opportunity to further broaden the scope and appeal of their content by adding robust state-of the-art support for accessibility features and services.
You can follow the development at the HbbPlayer GitHub section from here.
