The Philips TriMedia Digital Signal Processor is installed in the lab, on a PCI development card. It is designed for various multimedia applications, such as video, audio and digital communication.
Abstract
The Philips TriMedia Digital Signal Processor is installed in the lab, on a PCI development card. It is designed for various multimedia applications, such as video, audio and digital telephone communication.
On a TriMedia DSP donated to VISL lab by Philips this project implements a MPEG2 video decoder. The MPEG2 standard is a popular video compression format, used today in different applications such as DVD systems and High Definition Television (HDTV).
Project Goals
This project is mainly about exploring the capabilities of the TriMedia DSP. The work based on an already existing C language code MPEG2 decoder. The code in was modified to run on the TriMedia DSP, taking advantage of its special capabilities.
A secondary goal, after the successful implementation, is to achieve real time performance.
Solution
The open source used here is supplied by MPEG Software Simulation Group, and our main work was to use the hardware modules of the Trimedia to display MPEG video on a TV set, using it’s parallel computation capabilities to speed up performance.
To achive real time, run time analysis performance was needed. For this purpose, the TriMedia profiler tools were used. With run time statistics we could determine where improvements would be most beneficial. Some such improvements were implemented.
Testing the execution of the program was done by standard test bitstreams in different sizes and texture.
Tools
In this project we used C language for implementation.
We used Cygwin unix enviroment emulator, in order to be able to use the unix OS oriented source on a MS windows environment.
The Trimedia tools: tmcc C language compiler, tmgmon for running the application and tmprof for analyzing runtime statistics.
Conclusions
MPEG2 video decoder was implemented succesfully on the TriMedia DSP.
MPEG1 complience was kept with significantly good performance, in terms of run time.
Real time implementions were not met for all MPEG2 bitsteams. We recommend adding the use of the TriMedia VLD hardware module to boost performance of the input bitstream parsing, and also the use of parallel computtaions similar to the way we boosted the IDCT calculations, in order to achive this goal in future projects.
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank our supervisor Boaz Ophir for his guidance.
We would like to thank Gadi Zimmerman for helping with initial knowledge ramp up in TriMedia issues.
We would like to thank Philips for it’s donation, giving us the opportunity to be exposed to current days technologies.
We would also like to thank the lab staff.
We are also grateful to the Ollendorf Minerva Center Fund for supporting this project.