Design And Implementation Of Embedded Digital Media Adaptor

The concept of Digital Home becomes more and more popular recently. Traditional fashion of home entertainment is changing. People are eager to enjoy a variety of media content from the local network or internet in their living rooms. The Digital Media Adaptor (DMA) is a key component in the Digital Home environment. Along with the powerful media decoding functions, the DMA has intelligent network interconnect capability which is easy to configure and simple to use.The design of DMA system is composed of embedded hardware, embedded platform software, the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) middle ware and applications. The hardware platform mainly consists of the following components: an Intel IXP425 network processor, which is used for running the operating system and network stack, a Sigma Designs EM8620L media processor for multimedia decoding, and a DiskOnChip (DOC) NAND flash drive which offers adequate storage space for applications. The platform software are board support packages (BSP), the Linux kernel and root file system. Different from the general x86 platform, the platform software for embedded systems needs to be customized, including the porting of BSP, the kernel configuration and the organization of root file system. In order to support the DOC drive, a special boot code is also implemented.Universal Plug and Play micro stack offers zero configuration interconnectivity. Complied with UPnP AV specification, the DMA system can easily discover the information of media content on the home network. With the help of the skeleton module and function libraries provided by Intel UPnP Development Toolkit, a media server control point (MSCP) is implemented, after the detailed analysis and proper simplification of the UPnP AV protocol.As to the design of applications, the DMA system offers a user-friendly application program based on QT/Embedded GUI. The application is integrated with UPnP middle ware and Sigma Designs media libraries, and can be easily controlled by a remote controller. This system is successfully applied with the multifunction of inquiry, browsing, management and playback of various network multimedia.