[M4IF Technotes] Testing of HDTV software decoder

[Robert Bleidt]

About ten years ago, I was involved with a product that did exactly what 
you ask. It took five 9U slots in a large Sun workstation to store a few 
seconds of an HD sequence in DRAM - most of the labs working on HDTV 
research had one. But with the passage of time, I am not sure what people 
use now beside just a PC video card. Miranda and AJA Video have 
manufactured transcoders and sync converters to go from VGA outputs to 
tri-level sync RGB, as I recall. So if a video card has enough quality and 
memory bandwidth for you, one of these transcoders will solve the problem 
for a few hundred dollars.
(Another side note: also ten years ago, I built a converter product to go 
the other way - from a serial HD signal to a VGA monitor. If you didn't 
mind the letterboxing, a $700 PC monitor of that era didn't look bad next 
to a $50K Sony HD video monitor. This was disconcerting to people who said 
display technology was a  reason HDTV development was slowed...)
At 03:04 PM 6/20/2003 +0530, Biswajit Biswas wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>Can anybody suggest how to address this issue:
>
>If I develop HDTV software decoder which generates raw YUV data at  rate
>over 93MegaBytes/sec (for size 1920x1080), how do I take this data to
>display in HDTV terminal for checking subjective quality.
>
>The scenario is like explained below:
>
>Source material is decoded YUV data generated by our own HDTV decoder. The
>processing need is as shown below:
>_______     ____________        _____________
>|      |    |           |       |            |
>|YUV   |--->| Some      |       |            |
>|4:2:0 |    |           |------>|  SMPTE292  |
>|______|    | Transcoder|       |  signal    |
>             |   ??      |       |     or     |
>             |___________|       | Y Pb Pr    |
>                                   | component  |
>                                 |____________|
>
>YUV data is in main memory of desktop PC (RAM), a transcoder (assume it is
>available) reads it from this memory (may be through PCI bus) and converts
>it into HDTV compliant signal.
>
>Can anyone suggest any such Transcoder which can solve this problem?
>
>Regards
>Biswajit
>
>
>
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Robert Bleidt   - rbleidt   hdtv.com