DSP-based multi-format video decoding engine for media adapter applications

There are four major components in a generic digital home framework: media center; set-top box; media adapter; portable viewer. We present a DSP-based multi-format video decoding engine for realizing the media adapter application. By choosing a powerful DSP core and designing an efficient and configurable software engine, the proposed solution is believed to possess both low-cost and high-flexibility. In our current implementation, the media adapter can decode various types of video formats, such as MPEG-1/2/4, H.264/AVC baseline, WMV 7/8/9 and DivX 3/4/5. In our simulation, videos up to SD resolution can be decoded seamlessly.

I. Introduction

Digital home [1] is presented recently by leading companies in PC and consumer industries. To accelerate the maturity of digital life, a common framework for realizing the digital home is defined, and its goal is set to expand the range of convenient, portable and interoperable devices. Within this framework there are four major components: media center, set-top box, media adapter and portable media viewer. According to the framework, digital content is first generated and stored in the media center. Then, they can be accessed by media adapter, decompressed and displayed on TV. To deal with various video formats adopted by different recording devices or editing programs, it is necessary for media adapter to decode all popular kinds of multimedia formats, no matter the format is conventional or new-defined, standard or proprietary, memory-demanded or computation-intensive. The DSP-based architecture, among all possible solutions, has the highest flexibility for providing this functionality but with the least cost. By updating the software core, the decoding capability can be extended to cover all new video formats. In this paper, we present a framework of our multi-format video decoding engine, which now supports the decoding of MPEG-1 Video [2], MPEG-2 Video [3], MPEG-4 SP/ASP [4], H.264/AVC baseline [5], WMV 7/8/9 (WMV 9 is also known as SMPTE VC-9 or VC-1 [6]) and DivX 3/4/5 [7]. Our work also responds to the recent activity, Video Coding Tool Repository (VCTR) [9] initiated by MPEG, which targets at developing a super codec.