[chbot] Digital TV project

[Mark Atherton]

Hi All,

Several people at the group have asked about progress of the project. 
Below is a message that was posted to the pvrusb2 mailing list, who 
developed the V4L drivers for the MPEG encoder that I am using.

Hopefully it gives an update in roundabout terms, and also explains 
my continued hair loss :)

-Mark

=============

Hi All,

I am working on a small, low power embedded digital TV project (see 
http://www.idesignz.org/DigiLiteZL/DigiLiteZL.htm, and associated 
FPGA modulator 
http://www.idesignz.org/DigiLiteZL_FPGA/DigiLiteZL-FPGA.htm). One of 
the next steps of the project is to hook a real-time MPEG2 video 
encoder up to the system, running at a suitably low rate (maybe 1 or 
2Mb/s total stream rate). The power budget for the system does not 
allow for a PC, hence the desire to use a small embedded system.

An HVR-1900 MPEG encoder is at hand, but only composite video and 
audio inputs are required. This product appears to contain a Conexant 
CX23416 MPEG2 audio/video encoder, a CX25840 PAL/NTSC video decoder, 
and a Cypress FX2, or FX2LP USB interface. The unit has misc stuff 
associated with RF tuner etc, hopefully these can be ignored.

Moving on to signal flow: an external PAL video source will be 
plugged into the HVR-1900, the HVR-1900 will be plugged into a custom 
dsPIC33EP512MU810 board (which has a USB 1.1 host). The dsPIC has the 
job of initially loading required firmware into the HVR-1900 then 
selecting the required encode mode and translating the incoming real 
time MPEG Program Stream into Transport Stream. This data will then 
be transferred via a new parallel interface to the FPGA DVB-S 
modulator (USB is currently used).

So far the PVR-1900 has been attached to Ubuntu Studio 10.x via a USB 
1.1 hub, and it has been confirmed that the whole chain can generate 
a 1Mb/s PS using V4L. This was all rather easier than expected and 
worked pretty much off the bat, so well done.that team.

Having spent some time playing with a Cypress FX2 (CY7C68013) USB 
interface dev kit, it appears that the FX2 can accept firmware over 
the USB port, and run from it's internal 8k (FX2) or 16k (FX2LP) RAM 
using vendor command 0xA0. A second stage boot loader (vend_ax) is 
required if external RAM is required. Some amount of cleverness 
involves the device re-enumerating itself from default VID / PID 
(0x04B4 / 0x8613) once code has been loaded, so that alternate 
drivers can take over the boot and control process. It also appears 
that DID is used to differentiate the FX2 (DID 0x000x) from the FX2LP 
(DID 0xA00x).

So the next challenge is to completely understand all steps required 
to boot up a PVR-1900. From then, an understanding is required how to 
configure and use the booted device.

At a guess, boot sequence is something like:
1) PVR-1900 is plugged into the host (dsPIC)
2) host registers and enumerates the FX2 device within the PVR-1900 
using VID 0x04B4, PID 0x8613
3) host downloads FX2 firmware (or second stage loader vend_ax) using 
vendor command 0xA0
4) host releases FX2 8051 from reset, new code re-enumerates using 
alternate VID / PID combination
-- at this point, the FX2 8051 is running a boot loader that will 
allow code loading of CX25840 and CX23416 --
5) host loads CX25840 firmware (possibly using two wire interface)
6) host loads CX23416 firmware (not a clue)
7) host commands CX25840 to select video standard and input source
8) host commands CX23416 to select MPEG encode profile, bit rate etc.
9) host commands CX23416 to start encoding
10) host fetches buffers of MPEG video using BULK transfers over EP2 or EP6 (?)
11) host translates PS to TS, sending output video to FPGA via 
parallel interface
12) repeat from 10

Notes:
13) is BT565 is used as video path between CX25840 to CX23416, if 
not, then what ?
14) looks like Linux uses v4l-pvrusb2-73xxx-01.fw (16,384 bytes) to 
load into FX2
15) looks like Linux uses v4l-cx25840.fw (16,382 bytes) to load into CX25840
16) looks like Linux uses v4l-cx2341x-enc.fw (376,836 bytes) to load 
into CX23416

Any corrections, pointers to relevant web pages, or other help to 
start filling in the great voids of understanding will be most appreciated.

Many thanks,

Mark

PS Phew !