During boot, the firmware will display some graphics on the screen, and use the front LEDs on the STB. The on-screen graphics are known as a Splash Screen, and indicate the boot progress in a language-independant way.
The STB will use a fixed resolution for this image, and will show a signal on all video outputs simultaneously: HDMI/components and SCART (or available analog video outputs). It is shown as soon as it is available (when a valid image is found in the flash memory, or over the network), and it will replace the default background used by the firmware.
A small percentage bar is shown when booting with an upgrade
The splash screen can be a standard 24-bit BMP image, or BMPv3 with RLE8 compression. This format uses RLE with a 256 color palette. The version of the splash screen is contained in one of the reserved words of the BMP header, and will be converted to a string for comparisons with network available images for upgrading of the stored splash image. It is advisable to use RLE to reduce the size, and therefore the download time. The total size available for both the splash screen and the boot image is 32MB.
The PAL image has a reserved area of 300x80 pixels, starting at (210,370) pixels from the upper left corner. It contains two zones, a 5-segment area and a 10-segment area under it. The two areas are used to show progress of the boot (and upgrade) process.
This area is composed of 50x50 segments, starting from (219,372) and seperated by 8 pixels each. The splash screen should contain the values "blank", "red", "yellow" and "green" in the first four segments. These segments are used for drawing when appropriate during the boot sequence.
This area is composed of 20x20 segments, starting from (250,429) and seperated by 2 pixels each. The splash screen should contain the values "blank", "empty", and "filled" in the first three segments. These are used for drawing when appropriate during the upgrade sequence.
The following picture is a reference image where the described areas are visible. It is available as a BMP-RLE8 file and can be found in the KreaTV Starter Kit. Note: The image embedded in this HTML document is NOT of the correct format, for size reasons
Illustration showing splash screen regions (including blue margin for centered 640x480 "interest area")
The 5-segment area shows the overall progress of the boot, until the first application is loaded and running. On load the first four segments in the image ("blank", "red", "yellow" and "green") will be replaced by the fifth "blank" segment.
The 10-segment area shows progress during the update of a boot image:
For the meaning and timing of these changes and stages, see the Operations and Maintenance manual.
See the Infocast Server documentation for details on how to transmit the finished Splash Screen to the IP-STB.
The procedure used for the VIP12xx and VIP 15xx/17xx series IP-STBs differs from the VIP19xx in the following ways:
The program makesplash.sh is used to create the Spash Screen from a JPG image, not a BMP. The layout and functioning of this image is the same on all platforms. The makesplash.sh program can be found in the KreaTV Starter Kit. Please use the version appropriate to your platform.
Save your image in JPG format (720x576 for PAL, 720x480 for NTSC) and convert it with the makesplash.sh program:
$ ./makesplash.sh <infile.jpg> <outfile.spl>