Thursday, February 05, 2009

Open source and mobile talks at University of Waterloo

I went last night to Open Source Mobile development sessions which was about:
This last talk cautived me; Jean Mitchell is working for Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC) to develop broadcasting abilities for cell phones. This means that you could watch on your cell phone HD quality channels for free.

The broadcasting is already happening, the channels are already reaching your phone but we don't have phones with broadcast receivers on them.
What they have done is, they have taken a broadcast receiver attached it to an Openmoko device, written the drivers for it (they reverse engineered it from the Windows drivers) and voila! You have a broadcasting-enabled phone in which you can (not yet) watch the channels on your phone!

They are still working on the right licensing to use before they release the code and I said to him that without code there are no contributors so hurry up!
Another issue is that they are still missing the part that decodes the signal on the phone but I saw how they can already receive the audio broadcasting signal.

This is the page of their project which things are better explained than in my broken English:
http://openmokast.org

1 comment:

  1. I was going to modify the blog post but it might get reposted on the different planets.

    The speaker's correct name is:
    "Jean-Michel" and I was "captivated" by the talk/workshop

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