Media Processors Dominate DVD

Electronic News, Oct 9, 2000 by Mohammad Ayub Khan

RISCs no longer making the cut

DVD quickly became the talk of the consumer electronics business a few short years ago, and today, DVD players are in the mainstream of consumer buying. However, the Internet, cable, and satellite now are spawning new technology trends in programmable DVD that will give the consumer open-ended opportunities to download movies, business and home information, educational material, and a plethora of other similar forms of video and audio. We are now at the threshold of DVD pervasiveness and future growth of programmable DVD will be fueled by system-engineering innovation.

For the system engineer, programmability means greater design breadth and latitude for new and different functionality and product differentiation within a DVD portfolio. But this also means system-engineering management must recalibrate its design philosophy away from the original rigid hardware-based DVD designs and toward software-based solutions.

A hardware-based DVD player design is just that. Nothing more, nothing less. But programmability opens new vistas that a standard DVD player cannot even attempt. Video source will no longer only come from a DVDROM. Conversely, DVD-formatted contents now coming from the Internet, cable, or satellite allows the consumer to have DVD player capabilities in a set-top box as well as vast flexibility for saving a variety of video and audio programs.

Figure 1 shows a Web-enabled DVD player consisting of a TriMedia chip, a DVD drive, 4Mbytes of SDRAM, and flash memory to store applications. Accompanying software modules and architecture are shown in figure 2.

There is a host of reasons for programmable DVD. But for brevity's sake, just a few will be covered here.

By using new firmware provided by disk manufacturers, the user can correct slight authoring errors on those disks without manufacturers having to recall those products.

Also, programmable DVD will play a key role in supporting emerging standards like the Web DVD standard aimed at enabling HTML content, Web pages, and Web links and the Haiku Group standard that is defining new formats. The Haiku Group's charter is to establish a standard and specification for creating Web-connected DVD contents and thereby uniting the high quality of DVD with the dynamic capabilities of the Web. Programmable DVD also will be highly instrumental for the upcoming high-definition DVD or HDDVD. Lastly, programmable DVD will play a major role in home networking.

Programmable media processing is the linchpin for this new wave of programmable DVD technology that promises a paradigm shift for consumer electronics. In effect, this technology hands the system engineer the capability to map out and design multifunction/multimode consumer electronics products similar to a PCs multifunctions and multimodes.

However, this won't be easily accomplished by relying on conventional MPUs like RISC or even superscalar. On the contrary, the ideal engine is the programmable media processor that excels in handling a host of computationally intensive functions like audio and video compression and decompression, sample rate conversion, special effects generation and blending, image improvements, and other major operations like these.

As the industry moves further with programmable DVD, it is prudent for system-engineering management to closely investigate this new trend to determine how best to comply with these newer design requirements. Ease of programming is among the top engineering considerations, plus there must be an industry standard user interface. Ease of programming means not having to write assembly-level-language programs, but instead moving to higher-level languages like C or C++ to develop applications. Programming in these higher languages preserves the software investment when applications are carried forward to the next-generation multimedia processor.

Software flexibility demands some discipline, if you want to reap full benefits of programmability. TnMedia Streaming Software architecture is such a discipline based on data-driven model. This architecture was designed with the following characteristics: plug-and-play capability among the various software components, extensibility, scalability, reusability, modularity, and robustness. It's also important that this architecture delivers a framework that gives developers and design engineers the necessary flexibility for dynamically configuring a DVD system on demand in different modes at different times. For instance, such a system can allow the decoding of AC-3 audio, MPEG-2, PCM audio, or even DTS audio at different times.

In this architecture, a system typically consists of three sub- components for each functionality: audio, video, graphics and communication. Each subeomponent consists of a digitizer, a filter and a renderer. The digitizer interfaces with the input source and produces data packets that are sent to the filter for processing purposes. The input source can be a DVD-driver, the Internet, cable or a satellite.