Opera TV Emulator Released

Want to start developing for web-enabled TVs, but worried that you'll need a roomful of big devices to test and debug your web applications? Fear not: with today's release of the Opera TV Emulator (formerly known as the Opera for Devices Content Development Kit), you can check how your pages will look and work on the latest Opera-based TV browsers...all from the comfort of your desktop machine.

Compared to the CDK versions (which only worked in Linux), the new Opera TV Emulator is available as a pre-packaged VirtualBox image. This ensures a stable and consistent reference working environment, pre-configured to resemble those found on an actual device, and allows developers to easily test their sites under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

The main features of the new Opera TV Emulator:

  • provides a reference DirectFB device environment
  • based on the latest Opera for Devices SDK 3.1
  • integrated web remote control accessible from the VirtualBox host environment
  • supports CE-HTML and HTML5 (including audio/video support and the inclusion of H.264 decoding capabilities)
  • improved integration with Opera Dragonfly's remote debugging
  • ability to emulate different target device characteristics, such as allocated memory and browser speed, for a more accurate emulation of on-device performance

Head over to the Opera TV Emulator product page, fill out our short registration form, and take the emulator for a spin.

If you need more information about the various aspects that need to be considered when developing for TVs and connected devices, you should have a look at our article on Creating web content for TV over on Dev.Opera.