USENIX Association Proceedings of BSDCon ’03 San Mateo, CA, USA September 8–12, 2003 THE ADVANCED COMPUTING SYSTEMS ASSOCIATION © 2003 by The USENIX Association All Rights Reserved For more information about the USENIX Association: Phone: 1 510 528 8649 FAX: 1 510 548 5738 Email:
[email protected] WWW: http://www.usenix.org Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for noncommercial reproduction of the work for educational or research purposes. This copyright notice must be included in the reproduced paper. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks herein. Using FreeBSD to Render Realtime Localized Audio and Video John H. Baldwin The Weather Channel Atlanta, GA 30339
[email protected], http://people.FreeBSD.org/˜jhb Abstract data to the STARs out in the field including local observations, thirty-six hour text forecasts, daily ex- tended forecasts, radar images, and severe weather One of the largest selling points for The Weather alerts. In addition, TWC can send software updates Channel (TWC) is the ability to generate localized and other non-weather-related data over the satel- content for its subscribers, specifically local weather lite. forecasts. To facilitate this localized content, TWC deploys smart devices in cable head ends. These For example, every hour thousands of automated smart devices are called STARs (Satellite Transmit- observation stations all over the United States sam- ter Addressable Receivers) and are responsible both ple the weather conditions at their location and for collecting weather data and displaying the data transmit this data to the National Weather Service to the user in an audio and video presentation.