Video quality-of-service for multimedia consumer terminals - an open and flexible system approach

Future consumer terminals will be based on programmable platforms instead of dedicated hardware. Novel 'scalable video algorithm' (SVA) software modules provide trade-offs between resource usage and quality of the output signal. SVAs together with a strategy manager and a quality-of-service resource manager (QoS-RM) aim for flexible, robust, and cost-effective media processing in software on programmable architectures. We developed some SVAs including MPEG-2 decoding and image enhancement and the QoS control software to illustrate the power of the overall system. The resource limited hardware is a currently available DSP board with a single VLIW CPU TM1300 at 180 MHz from TriMedia Technologies Inc./sup /spl reg//. The system supports two inputs and several modes for main and PiP window applications, and, in addition, background recording.