Automation, Benchmarking and Analysis of Digital Video Recorder and Media Player Solution

Abstract

Electronic products have long become an integral part of the modern lifestyle. De- mand and supply of such products with smaller size, lower power consumption and better performance are ever increasing. What is the future of home entertainment and computing and how consumers cope with rapid changes of digital life? The PC is an amazing product; every year prices fall, while processing capabilities and storage capacity continue to escalate. However, the personal computer is not an ideal platform for home entertainment. The system hardware and software of PC are not designed for real-time audio video stream processing. The Digital Platform is a technical proposal for a new architecture for home entertainment and computing. The Digital Video Recorder (DVR) - a recorder that records on a computer hard disk has evolved as a low-cost, high performance consumer product. DVR is a popular se- curity device that provides real time monitoring, video capturing and video playback from storages. STMicroelectronics continues to lead the market for set-top box decoders with the various chip family and delivers its own solution of Digital Video Recorder abbrevi- ated as DVR & Media Player as MP and that has already presence across the globe. The scope of this project thesis is to do automation, benchmarking and analysis of the ST's DVR & MP solution and hence this thesis contains overview of Set Top Box basics, different video compression standards, DVB standards and DVR & MP features. Depending upon DVR and MP features, different test suits are developed to test all those features in automated way. DivX Certification is achieved as one of the benchmark of STMP. The key feature targeted for Analysis is Audio/Video Synchronization, so as covered various methods of AV Sync and how they differ one another with pros and cons.