Created by dan on Thursday 15th October, 2009 at 2:28 PM
Tags: GD, HTML, IPTV, Javascript, PHP, Web development
Let me kick-start my blog by going in head-first, and posting my first nugget of information...
While developing a well-involved IPTV system, I came across many, many frustrating limitations of Ant Fresco's browsing capabilities, although I'm fully aware that I'm using a dated browser, but it does handle things quite well, so yeah, anyway...
One feature I really wanted to add to the IPTV system was the ability to flick through the other channels' schedule information while watching the current channel. For a long time, users were required to return to the main menu and go through the channels there, however this really was not the best way to go, especially given that most Freeview set-top boxes and alike provided such functionality by default.
One of the setbacks I came across was that the Javascript support went only so far, meaning that support to modify inline content was non-existent, except for altering an input fields' value. So, I put on my thinking cap and realised something that I had done previously, which had been smacking me in the face for months without me realising its potential, which was that I was changing an images source on-the-fly with Javascript in the menu system, just using "img.src = '/path/to/image.png';".
Before I carry on, I must just make you aware that I've been using PHP for this project. So, given that I could alter an images source without changing the users location, I thought to myself, "why not use GD?". With this in mind, I cracked on with the idea, using Javascript to dynamically send whatever values I wanted as GET requests to a PHP GD script I had produced.
The moment I put the idea in place, it worked. Using my new GD TV interface script, users could now watch television, while switching between channels to see their schedule information, and scroll through that too. I also went as far as sending the same GET requests to the script, so that when the user hit 'OK' on the remote control while viewing the schedule information for a channel they were not watching, the browser would be redirected to the new channel, flawlessly.
Following the implementation of this solution, data usage increased by 200%, however it's had very little (if any at all) impact upon the performance of the system.
I continued to develop the script, and I'm finding never-ending features that could make use of this functionality, although I've published my thoughts in case anybody else has a similar issue.