How to Achieve 4:1 Lossless Video Compression

The SDI converter is a specialized device used to convert high-definition digital component serial interface (HD-SDI) signals into HDMI signals. It integrates an SDI receiver and an HDMI modulator, allowing for the easy conversion of HD-SDI signals to HDMI signals, while separating and embedding the audio signals carried by SDI into the HDMI signal for synchronized sound and image transmission.

Village Island Technology, established in 2005 in Tokyo, with headquarters in Japan and offices in Singapore and Malaysia, is a well-known supplier of professional broadcasting telecommunication audiovisual hardware solutions. So far, it has developed thousands of devices and systems for the broadcasting telecommunication industry for its partners. Village Island maintains flexibility and energy efficiency in achieving customer needs. Village Island’s products integrate technologies from many manufacturers around the world for combination, distribution, and reorganization. Additionally, Village Island provides professional services for its released technology products and organizes corresponding technical seminars and training every year. Village Island is also a member of IABM and TICO alliance. intoPIX is an innovative technology supplier mainly developing technology products for video compression, image processing, and solving audiovisual equipment security issues. The intoPIX team has rich experience in image processing and developing FPGA IP cores, while also developing supporting software tools to achieve cutting-edge TICO and JPEG 2000 compression and secure video transmission.

Recently, Village Island Technology released an SDI converter – the VICO-4 TICO SDI converter, which adopts a visually lossless 4:1 TICO compression method, funneling a 4K60P video stream (four 3G-SDI video streams or one 12G-SDI video stream) into a simple 3G-SDI output stream, reducing the consumption of infrastructure resources such as cables, routing, and broadcasting networks during video transmission.

Figure 1: VICO-4 4:1 SDI Converter

Figure 2: VICO-4 TICO SDI Converter Structure Diagram

Figure 3: VICO-4 TICO SDI Converter Connection Diagram

How does the VICO-4 TICO SDI converter achieve a 4:1 video compression ratio? The reason may lie in the real-time broadcasting environment, where video transmission adopts the lightweight TICO compression algorithm proposed by the intoPIX team. The TICO video compression algorithm has very low video latency (only a very small video line), and the VICO-4 TICO SDI converter internally implements the TICO video compression algorithm as a hardware IP, combined with software control, achieving frame-by-frame video compression while reducing video transmission latency. Figure 2 shows how 4 channels of 3G-SDI signals are converted into 1 channel of 3G-SDI signal.

From the main circuit of the VICO-4 converter’s main control board (marked part), it can be seen that there is a main control chip on the main control board, used to complete the 4:1 video compression and signal multiplexing, and this chip happens to be the Xilinx Kintex UltraScale KU035 FPGA chip. For the implementation of TICO video compression IP, the Kintex UltraScale KU035 FPGA contains a large number of on-chip programmable logic units and 16 16.3Gbps transmission ports, fully meeting the video compression IP’s requirements for 4 3G or one 12G-SDI I/O transmission interface.

Figure 4: VICO-4 TICO SDI Converter Mainboard

The Kintex UltraScale series chips launched by Xilinx have extremely high market cost-performance ratio and the maximum signal processing bandwidth for mid-range devices, realized through 20nm technology. They are widely used in network interface cards, video processing, image processing, ultra-high-definition cameras, etc., so the Kintex UltraScale series chips are undoubtedly the best choice for achieving SDI video signal conversion.