When talking to a potential customer that has its own non-standard video compression about how to output video with embedded-audio support through standard interfaces, the customer asked “Which core should I use?” The answer was that for what he wanted to do, he needed more than one video-cores.com core.
Our cores are simple by design and they are small in size so that the minimal functionality that a customer could need is there, then, the cores connect to each other with minimal or no glue logic.
The potential customer wanted to be able to send standard-definition (SD) or high-definition (HD) video with embedded audio through an SDI bit-serial channel and the answer to his question was to use the following cores: vc_272m_291mo (SMPTE 272M/291M encoder) to embed up to 16 channels of AES/EBU 20-bit audio or up to 12 channels of 24-bit audio through the SD part of the design and the vc_299m_291mo (SMPTE 299M/291M) to embed up to 16 24-bit audio channels through the HD part of the design. Then the customer needed the vc_656o (CCIR/ITU-R 656) encoder to output the video and embed the audio through a 10-bit SD parallel stream and the vc_274m_296mo (SMPTE 274M/296M) encoder to output the video and embed the audio through a 20-bit HD parallel stream. Finally the customer could use off-the-shelf SMPTE 259M (SDI) and SMPTE 292M(HD-SDI) chips to create the final serial stream (our own SMPTE 259M and SMPTE 292M cores are still in Beta Testing).
What we have found in more than three years of working with leading-edge customers in Broadcast, Consumer and Surveillance, is that the needs are varied where sometimes a customer only needs an encoder, sometimes only a decoder, sometimes a codec, so if the core is complex and is only a codec, the customer would be wasting valuable logic if it does not happen to get synthesized out.
So, the answer is usually going to be either one simple core for a simple function or a collection of cores for a complex function. Let us know as much as you can about your end application and we will be glad to recommend which cores to use.
RAUL
