Xenon was an embedded media player that I designed and developed over a period of two months for use on set top boxes like Virgin TiVo, Western Digital, Popcorn etc.
The new player delivered significant improvements over the previous version, such as:
- Media load times were halved
- Video scrub times were 3-4x faster
- Toggling between SD and HD was 3-4x faster
- Subtitle load times were reduced from 30-40 seconds to 3-4 seconds
- 3x as many content delivery networks (CDNs) were supported
- ABR1 bitrate down-switching was added
- Player memory consumption was reduced by 66%
- The size of the codebase was reduced by half
Xenon was used by BBC iPlayer, BBC Sport, BBC News and BBC Events apps and served more than 1 million streams per week.
On its release, users were pleased with the improvements:
I have found since BBC released the Connected Red Button on TiVo, BBC iPlayer has worked perfectly. I have watched loads on there over Christmas mainly in HD and I’ve no stuttering of the picture or any exiting from the program. Also it pauses and restarts without exiting back to menu. And if you press the forward arrow slowly between each press you can jump in 1 minute segments when fast forwarding so it is pretty easy to get to a certain part of the program. Now that the resume works with SD and HD programmes you can also leave and come back to where you left off earlier. I used to have all the problems like what most others have reported but now I can use BBC iPlayer at any time (including peak time) with no problems.
spj20016, Digital Spy Forum
I managed to watch the whole of Supersized Earth in HD last night on Tivo iPlayer without a single blip, stutter or buffering. Something has improved.
m0j00, Virgin Media Support Forum
More information is available at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs.