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Tutorials

These tutorials will hopefully give you an overview of some of the interactive TV standards that are being deployed today.

These tutorials assume that you either know something about digital broadcasting already, you’ve read my (or someone else’s) introductory page, or that you’re hoping things will get easier as they go along and that you don’t really need to understand all these silly acronyms.

In the latter case, good luck – I’ve tried to keep these pages fairly acronym-free, but that’s not always possible.

From this point on, I’ll only be describing the highlights of the specification. After all, the MHP specification is over one thousand pages long, and any tutorial can only cover so much of that. The full specification is available for free download from the ETSI web site. Many other specifications relating to DVB services can also be downloaded from there.

The JavaTV specification is similarly available from the Sun web site Reading the specs themselves is the only way to grasp all of the subtleties of the specifications, and at the end of the day you’ll need to do this anyway if you’re going to be developing software using one of these standards.

If you’re fairly familiar with the specifications, but want to learn how to use a specific feature, take a look at the code samples. These commented examples will show you how to do some of the most common tasks that an MHP application needs to do.

Please choose which tutorial to view: