New LSI Logic media processors to fuel IPTV development, says Saffari
Apr 24, 2007 8:00 AM
The Domino[X] Pro product family can be used across the entire IPTV infrastructure landscape where content is being repurposed for distribution and storage, said Bob Saffari, LSI Logic senior director of marketing and business development for advanced video products.
Want to know where the industry is headed? Look at the chips inside the technology that drives the ongoing evolution of the IPTV market.
That’s why when IPTV Update learned that LSI Logic announced a new family of programmable media processors and the DX-1810 encoder, it seemed like a good time to discuss the new Domino[X] Pro product family with Bob Saffari, LSI Logic senior director of marketing and business development for advanced video products.
IPTV Update: It’s commonly held that for IPTV service providers to compete successfully with cable operators, they must be able to offer at least two HD and two SD streams into the home in addition to telephony and Internet service. How does your newly announced Domino[X] Pro product family and the DX-1810 encoder specifically advance that goal?
Bob Saffari: The Domino[X] Pro product family advances IPTV’s goals by offering scalable and programmable media processing solutions that improve video quality and reduce the bit-rate per channel. Using bandwidth more efficiently leads to improved quality of service and the option to offer subscribers additional TV and HD VOD channels.
The LSI DX-1810 scalable high-definition (HD) encoder platform is an extremely powerful and flexible media processing solution. Its tera OPS processing power gives it the performance needed to provide superior video quality at low bit-rates. Sophisticated pre- and post-processing operations, such as motion compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) and deblocking, improve video quality while superior motion estimation, better Mode decisions, improved image analysis and advanced rate control enable higher compression efficiencies.
Additionally, the DX-1810 will support dual-pass operation, which will enable further bit-rate reductions. Furthermore, the Domino[X] architecture is flexible and powerful enough to enable our customers to achieve ongoing bit-rate reductions in the future, without completely re-architecting the system and starting from square one for every generation of encoder.
IPTVU: The Domino[X] Pro product family supports multiple compression approaches ranging from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 H.264 and VC-1. How does that flexibility assist vendors building products for IPTV applications from the National Super Head-end to ad insertion, regional hub, local switching office to the set-top box in the home?
Bob Saffari: Although IPTV/telco TV is associated with distribution of the content in the H.264 compression format, the reality is that there are large MPEG-2 deployments, such as Verizon, and some VC-1 based deployments, such as Telecom Italia, as well as video over IP to Xbox video game console for HD VOD. System providers value flexible solutions that can address all the formats.
The Domino[X] Pro product family can be used across the entire IPTV infrastructure where content is being repurposed for distribution and storage.
The Domino[X] Pro product family consists of a number of product lines, not just a single solution. It includes professional multi-standard encoders, transcoders and decoders. For example, in the National Super Head-end, where highest quality at the lowest bit-rate video is required for both broadcast and on-demand content creation applications, the LSI DX1810 HD platform can be scaled to support multi-pass (i.e. triple pass) HD H.264 to provide the highest quality video at minimal bit-rates.
In regional hubs, the DX1810 can be used as a single pass but very high quality re-encoder to convert HD MPEG-2 content received from satellite or ATSC terrestrial feeds into HD H.264 bit-streams for distribution through an IPTV network.
To convert a large number of SD MPEG-2 channels to H.264, LSI offers the DX1710 single-chip transcoder that offers great video quality and efficient compression in a single chip. Each DX1710 processor is capable of transcoding up to two channels of standard-definition (SD) or a single channel of HD in real-time, enabling high-density solutions to be implemented.
Domino[X] Pro-based solutions will support ad insertion, logo insertion and other applications over time.
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