Video On Demand Application for Set Top Box

Executive Summary

Our customer is a leading US based designer and developer of collaborative audio/video computing systems.

Our customer wanted to productize a video-on-demand application for the set-top-boxes already available on the market. The application targeted to allows users to play video files on a PC browser or TV. The customer did not have expertise on the TI platforms for embedded application development, and hence engaged eInfochips to provide the solution. Leveraging our high level of expertise in embedded application development for various domains, eInfochips developed the Video on Demand application based on TI's DM642 platform and reduced the project cost over 50% for the customer.

The application eInfochips developed for the customer finds selected video and audio files on local storage or from remote servers and transports it over PCI/ Ethernet to the set-top-box (Based on TI DM 642 Platform). The DSP decompresses and synchronizes the audio/ video files and plays it on a TV.

The Customer

Our customer is well known for their advanced solutions in the domain of consumer electronics and audio/video computing systems.
They wanted to productize a video on demand application for set top boxes and eInfochips associated with them to deliver the complete market-ready solution.

The Challenge

  • One of the challenges was to transfer the video data (640X480 @24 fps) at the rate of 2.5 Mbps and audio data (48 KHz, stereo) at the rate of 1.5 Mbps, over the PCI interface and decompress (using H.264 decompression algorithm) it before it could be played. This large amount of data handling required an efficient design of the DSP application to make full utilization of CPU power and its peripherals, and reduction in number of data copies.
  • Since both the audio and video were available as two separate files without any synchronization stamps, the synchronization at the time of play was a big challenge. It was not just the synchronization between audio and video but synchronization of audio/ video with time was also a challenge.

The Solution

Design & Development

With great punctuality, efficiency & proper synchronization between interfaces, application of various hardware devices and multiple audio / video algorithms, eInfochips' team delivered the complete solution in time achieving the desired performance.

The application streams user specified H.264 encoded video files with MP3/ PCM audio to TI's DM642 hardware for playback over the audio/ video ports. The PC application also provides an API interface for the web browser to pass the files to be played.

  • We have developed DSP application for live streaming of Audio/ Video data based on TI's DM642 based hardware
  • Team eInfochips has carried out Integration of MP3 Audio Codec and H. 264 Video Codec. This is to enable video application.
  • We have executed Synchronization of audio and video at the time of play, separate audio and video files as this is on demand and application.
  • We have developed well synchronized interfaces and applications for better utilization of CPU resources to make the system efficient

Host Component

The Host component exports an API to play, stop, pause, rewind & fast-forward. The host, after receiving the audio/ video files from the HTML application, reads one video frame of data from the video file and an equivalent audio data from audio file, and streams it over the PCI interface to the DSP component. It then waits for an acknowledgement from the DSP.

DSP Component

The DSP side application reads the audio/ video data over the PCI interface decompresses it and passes it to the respective audio/ video drivers after synchronizing them.

Technology

Platform: TI's DM642
Codec: H. 264 Video Codec

The Benefit

  • With expertise on embedded application development based on TI platforms, eInfochips enabled customer in reducing team size to half thus minimizing man-power and reduced development cost by over 50%
  • With “On Time Every Time” approach team eInfochips delivered the solution on time and reduced 10% development time for the customer and enabled a timely launch for the customer to grasp more market share