Digital Video Processing Applications
In all video processing applications—from production, storage, transmission, and reception—video technology is quickly being replaced by its digital video counterpart. From a broadcaster's point of view, equipment has to be upgraded to keep pace with the demand for digital television (DTV) and high-definition television (HDTV). On the consumer side, 1080p or full HD television displays are being widely adopted by consumers, setting the stage for content creation and distribution in 1080p. Today, much of the studio and video hardware for video processing and distribution does not support 1080p, but that is expected to change soon.
A typical studio video processing function includes accepting uncompressed video and manipulating it and either storing it on a server or compressing it for transmission. Typical processing functions include scaling, de-interlacing, chroma resampling, color space conversion, and mixing. A studio system commonly involves most of these functions stitched together along with high-speed memory interfaces. You can also use third-party intellectual property (IP) along with your custom design to build such systems.
However, to rapidly develop such high-performance systems, you need a framework which has readily available functions with standard interfaces and a means for designers to add customization or third-party IP into their design. Such a framework would make the integration of these functions fast and easy. In compression, the video signal is processed by a discrete cosine transform (DCT) function inside the device, converting an uncompressed video signal to a frequency domain (see Figure 1). In the frequency domain, any unwanted frequency content is removed from the full spectrum and the signal is then compressed and can be transmitted to inverse DCTs.
Figure 1. Example of Altera Solution for Digital Video Compression
Feature-Rich Programmable Solutions for Digital Video Processing
Altera provides a video framework, which includes tools and functions to enable studios to build 1080p video processing systems. Refer to the 1080p Processing page for more details on Altera’s video framework. Also, Altera and its partners have IP functions to implement most video processing functions used in a studio, including broadcast quality H.264 coders/encoders (CODECs).
The feature-rich architectures of Stratix® III and Stratix II GX FPGAs provide an excellent solution for developing digital video production and delivery equipment. The Stratix III architecture includes high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, up to 16 Mbits of embedded TriMatrix memory, up to 340K equivalent logic elements (LEs), and flexible I/O standards. Stratix II GX and ArriaTM GX FPGAs have up to 20 full-duplex transceiver channels that can support HD serial digital interface (SDI) rates of 1.485 Gbps and 3G SDI rates of 2.97 Gbps.
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