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The Sony Bravia LCD TVs run Linux

June 23rd, 2009 avinash Leave a comment Go to comments

20090623-sony-bravia

How many of you would like to get an LCD TV for Christmas? A lot, I bet. How many of you know that the Sony Bravia LCD TVs are powered by Linux? A lot fewer, I guess.

LCD TVs have a lot of pixels. When displaying a normal-resolution programme (say from the MBC), the TV must use extremely complex image processing algorithms to generate the missing pixels. For example:

  • SECAM @ 720 x 576 = 414,720 pixels every 1/25 of a second (I’m simplifying…)
  • HDTV @ 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels every 1/25 of a second

So the TV must digitally create 5 times as many pixels as in the original frame 25 times per second. As you can easily guess, this requires a lot of horsepower hence the use of a powerful computer inside the TV. Sony has chosen Linux to power that computer (specifically Linux kernel 2.6.11)

For the more curious, have a look at http://products.sel.sony.com/opensource/source_tv.shtml

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  1. selven
    June 24th, 2009 at 21:27 | #1
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    good to know :D

    those are the types of articles that does show up the world where the opensource community has reached

  2. Yasir
    June 28th, 2009 at 22:30 | #2
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    Even Air Mauritius uses Linux as OS in their planes :) The flight was kinda boring and I thought of watching a movie but when I tried to access the movie’s section using that wired hand-held device, I saw something like:

    Error
    Rebooting
    Loading Linux Kernel 2.something…

    didn’t expect open source software on planes :D

  3. avinash
    June 29th, 2009 at 23:56 | #3
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    In fact, Linux in airplanes (or in the space shuttle for that matter) is relatively common as in a lot of other embedded devices like phones, electronic appliances (Tivo, Linksys WRT54G, Lacie hard disks, McAfee firewalls, etc.)

    I guess the main reason is that the Linux kernel is extremely reliable and customisable unlike you know what :-)

  4. Yasir
    June 30th, 2009 at 12:30 | #4
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    Yep you are right, it’s more stable!! no BSOD and messages like dumping started on win vista etc…since the kernel is open souce, people are more likely to understand how to interface with Microcontrollers like PIC/ATMEL/AVR etc.. Windows Driver Model (WDM) is kind of restricted and writing drivers for devices are required lots of attention..I guess with linux, many programmers are here to help.

    regards,
    Yasir

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