Design and implementation of HDTV source decoder

We describe a HDTV source decoder that is part of the Chinese national HDTV functional prototype project. The decoder can decode in real-time the MPEG-2 transport stream at a bit rate of up to 60 Mbps. The system cross-divides the HDTV images to 4 SDTV images and use four MPEG-2 MP@ML video decoders which work in parallel. This new approach leads to a good system performance, less design time, lower total cost and compatibility to SDTV. The decoder has been tested in Beijing and Shanghai and the image quality is very good.