Futarque releases MStar-based Android STB dev kit

Thursday, September 17th, 2015
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Futarque Release MStar Semi based Android STB development Kit

Futarque, today announced the release of their DVB-T2 based Android STB development kit. The kit is available as small complete STB motherboard that can be purchased directly in large volume and used as the heart of a STB development.

The design uses Futarque’s DVB software stack incorporated into Android OS. Futarque have then added an Android Application called Aurora TV that can be used to watch TV.

The Aurora TV App can work either with the built in DVB-T2 tuner or it can hunt out any network tuners (for example SAT-IP) that are available on your home network and stream video from those direct to your TV.

The Aurora TV application can be quickly customised by Futarque for individual customers specific requirements. Alternatively for larger customer who have their own development teams then Futarque can provide the source code for the application under licence to allow STB makers to do the customisation themselves.

The Futarque STB board uses the MStar MSO9280, this is a highly featured chipset with 7000DMIPS Quad core ARM Coretex A7 CPU and ARM Mali 450 Graphics processor. Futarque have optimised the Android OS for this board giving very high performance. The video decoder supports HEVC including some H265 formats, plus H264 VP, AVS, Real Media, VC-1 and a 4K UHD to HD transcoder, plus a H264 video encoder.

Jesper Kaagaard from Futarque commented “The MStar MSO9280 is a very powerful IC and gives us the ability to provide a very high end product at a really good price point.“

Trevor Neal, Vice President of MStar commented “this is a very highly optimised completed design and should give STB makers a quick route to a mass production product.”

The product is available now and is demonstrated on MStar Stand at IBC this week.