HAVi

An average household nowadays contains many very complicated devices. Many of them are home entertainment devices related to handling different audio or video data. These devices are computers in essence, but just more specialized in their features than a home PC. Home networking has become very popular nowadays since a normal household might contain several PCs that need to use shared resources like printers or file shares. Home audio and video devices like VCR, TV, amplifier, tuner, DVD, CD player and set-top-box form a similar interconnected network (see Figure 1). Why couldn’t these miniature computers also make use of each other’s features and even control each other to make everything easier for the consumer?

Major consumer electronics, software, semiconductor and computer manufacturers think that this should be possible and have decided to make it happen. The manufactures, namely Grundig, Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Sharp, Sony, Thomson and Toshiba along with now over30 other participants, have formed a non-profit organization called HAVi (Home Audio Video Interoperability) for promoting the development of interoperable consumer products. The goal of HAVi organization is to provide a standard open architecture for intelligent audio and video devices to interoperate with each other regardless of manufacturer, operating system, CPU or programming language used for implementation (HAVi, Inc., 2001a).The first beta version of the HAVi standard version 1.0 was published in December 1998while the final 1.0 version was released in December 1999. The current version of the specification is 1.1 (HAVi, Inc., 2001b) and it was published in May 2001.