I-BOX

Client

EVS Broadcast Equipment is a worldwide leader in digital video disk recording technology for the television industry.

Project

Studio broadcast equipment relies on different communication protocols. There is a need for a universal format converter to interconnect this equipment or/and PC-based DVB servers. Such a system also requires a professional MPEG-2 decoder and a genlocking mechanism to allow the synchronised output of multiple decoders.

Solution

The I-BOX is a compact modular interface and multi-channel decoder system for MPEG-2 servers.

The I-BOX can be thought of as a telephone switchboard for digital video streams: it converts, routes, synchronizes and decodes DVB streams.

Its ASI/LVDS/ECL conversion capabilities and its DVB-C and DVB-S receivers allow third-party devices to work together. 

Connection to a server is performed through a range of boards transmitting 3 to 5 DVB channels in real-time over the PCI bus.

MPEG-2 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 decoding enable the monitoring of any video stream in the box. With up to 12 MPEG-2 decoders in a 3U rack, it is also a very compact solution for applications like video walls.

Its pixel-accurate playback features broadens the decoder application range thanks to a versatile genlocking board.

DELTATEC developed the architecture of this concept and designed each of the 12 different boards that can be plugged in the I-BOX and their associated embedded software, the communication software enabling the remote control of all the I-BOX functionalities and finally a SDK to build up management applications on the PC server.