Video: Amino Freedom MeeGo TV – Work 3 times faster with MeeGo than any other platform.

As you know, MeeGo isn’t just for phones and tablets, it’s pretty much for everything that has a screen or can be viewed on a screen. Here’s the first generation of Intel and Nokia’s MeeGo for the TV on the Amino Freedom OTT Hybrid Media Centre box, brought to you by the MeeGo Experts folks who went to CES 2011. (Cheers for the tip Jim!)

The conversation is a little hard to hear but you can see some cool things like how MeeGo can use Linux Applications like Open Arena which hasn’t been recompiled for MeeGo. It just runs out of the box. One of the reasons Amino cites for using MeeGo – rapid development.  For Amino, Fully Open Linux means fast time to market, faster than if they had used other platforms. There’s also a demo of the flash enabled webkit browser, smart search and that PS3 like media centre icon interface. It also appears that it will come with MeeGo App Up Store (for possibly all those many, many Qt apps that Ovi Store users might also get access too, huh?)

Some Tech Specs – more like a screenless netbook than a set top box.

• Intel CE4150 Processor << Said to be the fastest media player processor available, with a t 1.2 GHz processor and a 400 MHz GPU (says a google search)
• 250 Gb Hard Disk Drive
• 512Mb RAM Main memory
• HDMI 1.3 Composite Video (Shipping with HDMI 1.4)
• Analogue Audio
• Ethernet 10/100 BASE-T
• 2 x USB 2.0

via MeeGo Experts

There’s some some other cool info under the video about MeeGo pinched from the Amino MeeGo Case Study PDF:

Design Win for Major European Telco

Eager to have a prototype finished in time for the International Broadcasters
Conference (IBC) in September 2009, Amino got to work. Le Foll’s team took
an early version of the MeeGo software stack designed for netbook computers
and repurposed it for the Smart TV market.
In six weeks, Amino had a hardware prototype finished and showcased it at
IBC. There, the product caught the eye of a major European telecom provider,
which challenged Amino to further develop its prototype and come back five
days later with a demo.
“We delivered,” Le Foll said. “We told them we could have a customized version
of our product ready for them in three months because we were using the
MeeGo platform and the Intel Atom processor. We demonstrated that we
could develop at a speed that they had not seen before.”
In January 2010, the telco selected Amino to develop the set-top box
technology, and Amino got to work

Development Work Cut by 66 Percent:

Three months later, right on schedule, Amino delivered the base software
running on a final hardware design. Integrating both customer and national
specific extensions required an extra three months, which stretched the total
development and integration time to six months. “We went three times faster
with the MeeGo platform than we could have with another platform,” Le Foll
said. “Most of the work was already done for us—all the tools were available
and operational—giving us the opportunity to really focus on the TV side of
the project.”

Unprecedented Development Flexibility

Because Amino’s set-top box hardware did not exist when software development
began, Le Foll outfitted his development staff with standard Intel-based PCs
and ported the application code to their Intel Atom processor-based hardware
when it did become available. The package structure of MeeGo and the Open
Build System (OBS), a software packaging and distribution system common
in the open source world, was selected to minimize porting time from the
development target to the final system.
Another development accelerator was the team’s use of the Python* language
with the binding to the multi-platform application framework, QT* (from Nokia)
rather than the more traditional C++ with a set of low-level APIs. “No one uses
Python in embedded Linux projects because it uses a lot of memory,” Le Foll says.
“But I reasoned that memory is more cost effective than software engineers. I
could afford to have $5 worth of extra RAM if it meant going twice as fast.”

Category: MeeGo, Video