I just got off a flight on one of the new-ish Airbus 330 aircraft. It has in-seat video. I caught the screen as it was rebooting, and it runs linux - surprisingly, apparently a fairly unmodified linux framebuffer system (you see the penguin logo, all of the boot messages, etc. Unfortunately, it all went by too fast for me to follow....)
Anyone know who makes the systems? The only one I know of, Rosen Aviation, seems to only make the screen mounts.... Who is the integrator? What mobo-screen do they use?
Well, from what little I do understand of aircraft design, the in-seat entertainment system is on a "non-critical bus", meaning that power can be interrupted or whatever....
I did notice that the in-seat systems restarted (screen went blank and then came back on) quite a few times when the plane was leaving the gate and taxiing, leading me to think that this was something being done by the crew or automated systems. But I did catch the penquin logo only once....
As for the assertion that the system is slow, figure that you have 1/2 of the 300+ people on the plane streaming videos at any one time. Then figure the bandwidth involved..... Even at 320x240 (and I suspect the videos are running at 640x480, 25 FPS or so) the bandwidth demand is
*huge*.... This is assuming there is a central server somewhere on the plane.... I can't imagine that each seat would have its own hard drive....
That's on the "old" systems.... The ones that had fixed channel programming, like a TV. This is video on demand - you browse the selection, then play the movie, so each seat can potentially get its own stream. Based on 2 MB/sec, and 150 streams, you're talking 300 MB/sec...
That's a pretty serious network... Something like a 10Gb backbone... They have to be doing some sort of subnetting...
In-flight Entertainment systems are chosen by the individual airlines, just like the rest of the cabin interior. You'd have to ask the airline (or more likely, search google for clues using the keywords of 'In-flight+Entertainment Airbus+330 name_of_airline'
For _your_ entertainment
--------------------- There is a wonderful cartoon from the German computer magazine *c't* pinned to my group's noticeboard. A passenger is sitting in an airliner using his laptop, and on the screen appears:
Bluetooth: new device found: Airbus A310
(reported in Risks Digest 23.72 17 Feb 2005 - article dated 13 Feb 2005)
No sooner do I finish posting and go back to work, and I find:
Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2006 21:59:40 +0100 From: De Kameel User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (Windows/20050923) Newsgroups: alt.os.linux.mandriva,alt.os.linux.mandrake Followup-To: alt.os.linux.mandriva Subject: The Inquirer: Airbus 330 seats auto-reboot / Redhat Linux involved
formatting link
Doesn't give much, because again the airline isn't mentioned.
Many moons ago I was on a Virgin 747 and the system did a reboot. What came up on screen was a standard PC boot, complete with AMI BIOS messages. Then it booted into DOS.
I did 'design' such a system once for mental exercise on a flight (well, the films were all crap) and just assumed it would use some sort of MPEG stream to the seats, with a decoder at that point. Based on a typical sixteen channels of 2Mbit MPEG, you'd only be chucking out 32Mbits plus overheads.
--
Dave
mail da ve@llondel.org (without the space)
http://www.llondel.org
So many gadgets, so little time
Yeah - it's lower priority. When the shan hits the fit, it's gone unless they are also using it for emergency briefings and the like. You may recall some airlines give a briefing _movie_ after push-back welcoming you aboard, and showing you the wonderful safety features on this $PIG. It's going to be ignored just as hard, but it allows the airline to give a better demonstration - such as how _do_ you open this emergency door, and how the masks deploy. It's not a obvious as depicted on that little folder in the seat pocket.
Normal - changing from ground power, to APU to the engine driven generators. The modern airliner is an extremely complex beast, and even a twin engine aircraft will have at least three independent electrical generators, maybe as many as five (two direct drive, two driven by air motors, and one by the APU) in which case one might be allowed to be inoperative according to a very complicated "minimum equipment for dispatch" list. Actually, during push-back, engine start, and taxi, the back of the bus is at least as important as the rest of the aircraft. Priorities change at the end of the runway.
What airline?
Multiple Gigabit fibers
Multiple servers, equipment bay near the front of the bird. The fun comes when they move the seats (maintenance, or re-configuring the bird to meet [up or down] the competition). Remember that despite the fact that a 340-500 or 340-600 may have a maximum weight of 811,300 pounds (368.0 Metric Ton), every ounce/gram of "extra" weight reduces the amount of (high) paying cargo/passengers that can be carried. You may get the concept if you know that airlines go ga-ga over a tenth of one percent improvement in fuel consumption. They pay A LOT LESS at the pump than you do, but a 340-500 holds 56,500 US Gallon (213,900 liter) - is that going on your credit card, or are you paying cash?
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