英文文献

An Embedded System Design for High Definition

Media Player

Deng Feng, Hu Jianliang, Qi Xiangdong, Wang Jinlin

National Network New Media Engineering Research Center, Beijing, China

e-mail: fdeng@

Abstract—With the huge increase in popularity of high definition applications, the traditional media player can not meet the demand for high-definition media broadcasting nowadays. This paper is focused on the system design of a next-generation progressive high definition media player based on Sigma Designs EM8623L, which adopted an embedded platform architecture and hardware decoding technology that support playback of multiple video and audio file formats. The paper details the implementation of system hardware and software. The practice results have shown that this product has low-cost, low power, portable appearance and powerful advanced high definition playback performance, and confirmed to be satisfactory by the development team and market consumers.

Index Terms—Embedded Platform; Hardware Decoding; High Definition; Media player

I.I NTRODUCTION

With the fast development of communication technologies, and the huge increase in progressive popularity of high definition applications, the traditional media player can not meet the demand for high-definition media broadcasting nowadays. There are three basic types of high-definition media player at present: Blu-ray disc player, home theater personal computer and streaming media player. Blu-ray disc player, using next-generation Blu-ray DVD technology, storage capacity can be turned nearly six times than the ones adopted red laser DVD standards, but Blu-ray disc player is not compatible with the existing traditional DVD, and high production costs, making Blu-ray disc player and disc prices are extremely high. Due to the expensive marketing cost, Blu-ray player has promoted very slowly and only popular among Blu-ray fancier.

Home theater personal computer (HTPC) is a convergence device that combines the functions of a personal computer and a media center software application which feature video and music playback, and usually but not always it also has digital video recorder functionality [1]. It's used as a replacement for or supplement to a DVD player, and sometimes cable or satellite receiver. Although video output from a HTPC can rival high-end dedicated HD playback devices, but HTPCs are more complex, and the software in use may require configuration pre-set. In addition, HTPCs often use more power than consumer audio/video components.

Streaming media player is equipped to handle streaming media, which means that media is constantly delivery to the device over an internet connection and played for the consumer immediately, rather than being saved to the hard drive. Streaming media technologies have improved significantly since the 1990s, when delivery was typically uneven. However, the quality of streamed content is still dependent upon the user's connection speed and network circumstance. Due to packet loss, latency, jittering and Quality of Service (QoS) based issue, it is difficult to demonstrate real-time streaming high-quality playback performance, especially in a large scale online deployment applications.

Regarding to the shortage of the high definition media players mentioned above, this paper proposes an embedded system design scheme of a next-generation progressive high definition player based on Sigma Designs EM8623L, which adopts an embedded platform architecture and hardware decoding technology that support playback of multiple video and audio file format and realize composite information issue with video, audio, picture and roll titles. Specifically, the system is designed to support two ways of new media content obtained, pushing automatically from or a user self-subscription program to the server with which it is orientated. The system also supports media files local storage, the local storage medium can be a build-in hard disk or an external mobile hard disk with USB interface. This embedded HD media player can overcome the limitations due to network bandwidth and bad broadcast effect under heavy congested network environments. Besides, it is more portable, cost-effective and low power than their dedicated counterparts.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives a brief introduction on system hardware platform, mainly focus on the description of the adopted core processor and its peripheral interface design. Software architecture, components design and its implementation are summarized in Section 3. The paper concludes in Section 4, along with a discussion on future work.

II.S YSTEM H ARDWARE P LATFORM

The high definition media player hardware system block diagram described in this paper is shown in figure 1, including: high-definition decoder chip EM8623L; 128MB SDRAM and 8MB flash memory; network interface controller; front panel control circuit; built-in 2.5-inch notebook SATA hard drive interface; various video and audio outputs, such as digital high definition multimedia interface (HDMI), YPbPr, composite video signal interface (VIDEO) and other video interfaces, optional digital audio interface, such as S/PDIF, coaxial digital audio interface (COAXIAL ) and two-channel stereo audio interface (R-AUDIO-L).

2010 Second International Conference on Communication Systems, Networks and Applications