New IP Streaming Decoder Board for the eyevis Netpix Graphics Controller Series
15 July 2008
The new IP streaming decoder board is the latest development for the eyevis NPX3x00 series, it offers hardware decoding of universal streaming video signals in real-time with very low latency. Each streaming decoder card can decode up to 32 CIF streams or up to 8 D1 streams. Through a new hardware decoding architecture each channel can simultaneously decode different codec formats. This flexibility allows large visualisation systems, supporting display grids of up to 64 outputs and a virtually unlimited number of inputs.
The NPX-IPDB is an input board for the netpix controller series. It has been especially designed for the integration of IP video streams in large screen systems. Its new hardware architecture allows hardware decoding of any codec format in real-time. in the past, there were special decoding devices necessary, which were only able decode the streams from certain camera to process the signals from certain camera producers, or only certain stream formats.
The NPX-IPDB can handle streams from any producer and any codec format, as soon as the codec is integrated. Each NPX-IPDB can decode various streams simultaneously, independent from the camera brand, the image quality and codec format.
DECODING OVERVIEW
The decoder board is equipped with a powerful processor which can handle up to eight streams with a resolution in D1 quality and 25 frames per second. Through the new hardware architecture 32 streams in CIF quality are possible per decoder card. Megapixel resolutions are supported as well.
One IPDB board can decode in real-time with 25/30 frames per second:
- 32x CIF 352px x 288px
- 8x D1 720px x 567px
- 2x megapixel 1280px x 1024px
Different codec formats can also be decoded simultaneously on the same decoder card, with no dependence on their resolution:
- MPEG2 ISO/IEC-13818
- MPEG4 part 2 ISO/IEC-14496-2
- MPEG4 (H264) ISO/IEC-14496-10 (AVC)
- MJPEG motion JPEG
The main reason for the development of the NPX-IPDB was the rising demand for the integration of IP streams in large screen systems in control rooms. Transmitting video signals via IP networks is practical and efficient, since the networks most often already exist.
There has been the problem in the past, that in many installations there were cameras or encoders from various producers in use, which provided signals in various formats and different qualities. There were numerous decoders necessary to process the signals for the display on the large screen system. With the NPX-IPDB the signals from the cameras and encoder can directly connected to the graphics controller of the large screen system.
The main advantage of the hardware decoder solution compared to software decoding, is that the performance of the system does not suffer from the decoding. With software decoding the processing of the signals affects the performance of the system's CPU. With the NPX-IPDB the processing is done by the hardware of the board.
