This case study from Mistral showcases our capability in offering Design Services for Video Streaming Applications (Video Streaming Designs) for an Android Multimedia Live Streamer product with Full HD Video Streaming transmitter and receiver for a customer in Digital Multimedia and live video-casting domain.

HD Video Streaming refers to primarily audio and video content delivered in real-time, as events happen. With the phenomenal growth of internet, media compression techniques and high end media processing technologies, HD Video Streaming Designs have become all pervasive; finding application in a wide variety of activities like medical electronics, home automation, media and publication, industrial automation, security and surveillance among others. This case study from Mistral showcases our capability in offering Design Services for Video Streaming for an Android Multimedia Live Streamer product with Full HD Video Streaming Designs for transmitter and receiver for a customer in Digital Multimedia and live video-casting domain.

The Customer

The customer is a global leader in Digital Multimedia domain and automation for personal and enterprise solutions. The customer provides a full range of equipment, sub-systems, control systems and surveillance devices with HD Video Streaming Designs for Home and Office space environment. The customer wanted Mistral to provide them with custom Design Services for Video Streaming application.

The Requirement – HD Video Streaming Designs

The customer was designing and developing a compact, Multimedia Live Streamer with         Full- HD Video Streaming and rendering device for use with a Digital Media system and other applications. The  HD Video Streaming Application to be developed had to be configured as AV transmitter or receiver and support up to 1920 x 1080 with 60fps resolution as input. Based on the study and analysis done by them on different application frameworks in Linux, Android emerged as the ideal platform to be used for Next generation HD Video streaming designs.

The customer has comprehensive experience in Video streaming designs based on G-Streamer framework on Linux. Hence, customer entrusted Mistral with the task of building the software for Full HD video streaming transmitter and receiver based on Android version 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean). The AV Receiver also had to support all possible high and low resolutions. The video transmitter had to support HD Video Streaming over various transport protocols and media container and the AV receiver had to render the AV content to an HDMI Display panel.

Design Services for Video Streaming

Mistral offered the customer end-to-end Design Services for Video Streaming – H.264 transmitter and receiver offering HD video streaming designs over an IP network.  The ARM Cortex™-A15 based SoC consists of an Dual-Core ARM Cortex™ for general purpose computing and ARM Dual Cortex-M4 Image Processing ® unit. Dual-Core PowerVR SGX544™ 3D GPU in the SoC enables high-end graphics resolution. The team developed the complete HD Video Streaming software for a Dual core ARM Cortex™-A15 SoC  based device developed by the customer that gives great performance and supported H.264 and JPEG hardware encoder. The Toshiba HDMI to CSI interface was used to support the input.

• FULL HD 1920 X 1080p 60Hz resolution as input source to device was
  achieved by using Toshiba HDMI to CSI interface
• Device supports interlace and progressive resolutions as input to device
• Encoding of multimedia content was achieved using AAC for Audio and
  H264/AVC for video
• Playback of multimedia content was achieved using Audio and Video
  with High performance Dual-Core Heterogeneous Multicore SoC
• Software support for RTP/RTSP/MPEG2TS/MJPEG transport protocols
• Software support for multiple rendering resolutions: 176×144, 352×288,
  528×384, 640×360, 640×480, 720×480, 800×480, 800×600, 1024×768,
  1280×720, 1280×800, 1366×768, 1440×900, 1600×900,1600×1200,
  1680×1050, 1920×1080; at frame rates up to 60 FPS
• Software support for video (up/down) scaling
• Software support for video bit rate of 95Kbsp to 25Mbps.

Design Challenges

Mistral successfully did the Transfer Of Technology (ToT)  for HD Video Streaming Android’s platform architecture and development through onsite technical interaction with customer’s engineering team. Some of the significant implementations handled by the Mistral team are listed below.

• The ARM Cortex-A15 SoC and Android AOSP (Android Open Source Package) does not support HDMI input, hence, Mistral emulated HDMI input as a camera and developed a camera driver in TI Ducati engine to support Toshiba HDMI to CSI interface
• The chosen version of Android for the video streaming design did not have support for all output resolutions and was not validated with some of the streaming protocols. Mistral customized the Display & Camera CSI input resolutions to support all output resolutions as per customer requirement for HD Video Streaming.
  • Mistral implemented RTP/RTSP/MPEG2Ts/MJPEG transport protocols from RFC reference which was used to transfer the AV content over the Ethernet
  • Mistral provided support on hardware abstraction layer and the respective framework components in Java Native Interface layer for the multimedia streamer application developer to use API to interact with lower layers
• HD Video streaming supported with variable bitrate to stream over bandwidth (95Kbsp to 25Mbps), from low to high end devices.