Our aim is to use commercial, off-the-shelf, systems rather than to develop custom hardware. Accordingly, the core of our system is a high-performance PC, with gigabit Ethernet and an HDTV capture card.
The main requirement is for a PC with a dual 64 bit/66 MHz PCI bus architecture. We use a Dell PowerEdge 2500 server with dual 1.2GHz Pentium III processors, running Linux 2.4. This is equipped with a 3Com 3c985 gigabit Ethernet interface.
For HDTV capture and playout, we use the HDstationOEM card from DVS, providing SMPTE-292M capture and display via a PCI interface. This card operates in several modes: captioning, capture and playback. We use it to capture HDTV into main memory, and to regenerate SMPTE-292M output at the receiver. The system can also display HDTV on the workstation monitor, using a software based decoder. The capture card supports a range of video formats, but our system uses only SMPTE-296M (1280x720 pixels, progressive scan, 60 frames per second) at this time.
To source HDTV content, a camera or VTR with SMPTE-292M output is required. We use a Philips LDK-6000 HDTV camera, as it is switchable between interlaced (1920x1080 pixels, 30 frames per second) and progressive (1280x720, 60 frames per second) scan modes.
The receiver can display the video in a window, or use the video output of the HDstationOEM card. A 16:9 aspect ratio display, for example the Pioneer PDP502MX 50" HDTV plasma monitor, is needed for optimal display.
| Description | Release Date | Source Code |
|---|---|---|
| HDTV sender | 10 January 2002 | hdsend-0.3.4.tar.gz |
| HDTV receiver | 10 January 2002 | hdrecv-0.4.4.tar.gz |
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