XFSI: Extensible Formatting Systems Inc.
Extensible Formatting Systems Inc. (XFSI) was intrigued by Synthesis's palpable fascination with interactive television (ITV). XFSI asked the Synthesis engineers, "What's on the horizon for ITV?" The resulting dialogue led XFSI to invite Synthesis to assist in solving a puzzle - creating an OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP) editor for one of its biggest clients, Comcast. Together with TV Works, Synthesis and XFSI worked to revamp aspects of the next generation of Comcast's ITV, as well as generate new tools for validating broadcast streams and applications.
The team of XFSI, TV Works and Synthesis created several new components for the next chapter of Comcast's ITV development tools. One such device was a "transvalidator" for Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF), the format of interactive TV applications. The transvalidator translated EBIF data to and from a readable XML format while authenticating binary data via syntactic and semantic checks.
The final editor was an Eclipse-based platform that allows ITV application developers to simulate those applications on their computers; previously, developers were forced to work blindly, without the ability to view their work before launching onto a set top box. The simulator supported an extensive configuration system and dozens of video codecs, as well as fully sustaining video-on-demand (VOD) and broadcast video trick modes. As partner in this project, Synthesis built a customized video rendering library based on FFMpeg with drastically superior performance than other existing Java video libraries.