Introduction

This product introduction and information is brought to you courtesy of DriverHeaven and ATI - new home of Avivo technology. If your life is lacking in clarity, look no further than Avivo - reviving your vision.

ATI is proudly introducing Avivo technology, allowing video to become yet another integral part of your computing experience. Thus it becomes even more important to deliver a high fidelity experience to the consumer, by providing a solution of the highest quality. This entails treating the video data properly, from the moment it first enters the PC, to when it is displayed. This end-to-end process is hereafter referred to as the video pipeline.

Think of Avivo as becoming ATI's next-generation video and display platform targeted specifically at delivering the highest quality and performance for this growth in media usage. Avivo incorporates a number of technologies, to help provide new video experiences, and numerous capabalities which represent a quantum leap in quality tailored to the best experience for all display needs (paraphrased from the ATI whitepaper).

Avivo enhances your digital video and photos, creating sharp images, crisp text, and vivid color. Boost the video quality captured by your Media PC and Personal Video Recorder with advanced 3D comb filtering and automatic gain control. Improve analog video signal quality and reduce annoying artifacts. Maintain clean images even at high display resolutions with Avivo’s video scaling technology. Large or small, Avivo makes your displays come to life when viewing digital photography and video.

Get high image fidelity with CRT and LCD displays, TVs, rear projection and plasma TVs, as well as projectors. Avivo introduces new life to colors across the entire spectrum with an advanced 10-bit-per-color display engine. Gain better digital signal reception, and maintain cleaner video with hardware noise reduction. Enjoy high-quality analog video capture enabled by robust 12-bit analog-to-digital converters. With Avivo, any video display paints a radiant canvas that will delight your eyes.

Avivo’s HD video playback enters the realm of high-end home theater systems. Free your CPU to devote more processing power to other applications with Avivo’s hardware accelerated processing of new HD video formats, including H.264. Transform your movies and improve every image sent to your display with hardware post processing for superb stutter-free viewing. Avivo gives your video playback the smooth, fluid motion you want from your HD content.

Avivo leverages ATI’s acclaimed Xilleon™ and Theater™ Digital TV technology found inside many of today’s high-end consumer televisions to make your PC a universal multimedia hub. Dissolve connectivity barriers between PCs and consumer electronics devices. Outputs for virtually any TV via analog or digital interface, such as s-video, DVI or HDMI™, are complemented by inputs for cable, broadcast TV and other video sources. And advanced dual-link DVI interfaces support the largest high-resolution LCD displays. Your PC with Avivo becomes the ideal center for your entire digital home.

Avivo enhances video capture, processing and playback, ensuring end-to-end high-fidelity from the moment video signals enter your PC, all the way to the image displayed on your monitor. New ATI products incorporating Avivo technology support HDTV and coming technologies like HD disc formats such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Avivo redefines the ultimate visual experience for today’s PCs, and sets the stage for tomorrow’s exciting possibilities.

As video becomes an integral part of the PC experience, it becomes ever more important to deliver a high-fidelity experience to the end user by providing a solution of the highest quality. This entails treating the video data properly from the moment it enters the PC to when it is displayed. This end-to-end process is referred to as the video pipeline.

3D comb filtering
Comb filtering is a pre-processing step used to separate the color and brightness signals on incoming video when these are input together (as in over-the-air TV and composite video). Simple comb filtering separates these signals from within a single image (thus called 2D comb). ATI’s advanced comb filtering is 3D: it uses the two dimensions of the image plus the third dimension of time to best separate the signals.

Avivo 3D Comb filtering (left) vs. typical 2D comb filtering (right – note color bleeding on brown buildings)

Hardware noise reduction
‘Noise’ in video manifests itself in the form of additional graininess or ‘snow’ in the video image. This noise has two key detrimental effects: it is visually distracting, and it makes video harder to compress, leading to larger files sizes and bit-rates. ATI’s Avivo capture/encoder technology has the capability to remove this noise, and in so doing, makes the image ‘cleaner’ which improves the compressibility of the video.

Digital Capture – Multipath cancellation
ATI’s Avivo-enabled digital capture devices are designed to accept terrestrial (free over the air) digital TV signals in even the most challenging areas, thanks to multipath cancellation. This technique ensures that signal echoes and distortions caused by the environment (such as hills in a rural setting, or buildings in a more urban one) are eliminated prior to the demodulation process. This capability ensures that ATI’s digital demodulators are the reference when it comes to capturing digital signals from the air.

Avivo Encode
Avivo-enabled products offer encoding capabilities at two levels. Analog capture products such as those based on the Theater 550 product have integrated compression hardware while all Avivo playback products (ATI’s discrete graphics products and integrated graphics chipsets) offer hardware-assisted compression and transcoding, to facilitate media interchange.

Hardware MPEG2 compression
ATI’s Tuner-Encoder products bring full hardware MPEG-2 compression to the PC. Full, dedicated video encoding is essential for applications that require low CPU utilization, for the reasons discussed earlier. ATI’s encoder products reduce CPU utilization to as low as 3-4% while encoding live TV signals at unmatched quality levels.

Hardware-assisted video compression and transcode
In addition to the dedicated compression (encode) capabilities of Avivo-enabled TV tuners and demodulators, Avivo-enabled VPUs and accompanying software work together to permit transcoding of video signals. Transcoding is the process of re-encoding video in a format (or simply at a bit rate) different from its original. Transcoding capability is becoming extremely important at a time when there is an explosion of video-capable devices (PDAs, cell phones, portable game consoles, etc) that have widely-varying capabilities in terms of the formats they support and the amount of storage they have (which will determine the bit-rate that needs to be used).

Avivo Decode
Hardware assisted video decode for reliable playback
ATI’s highly flexible VPUs have dedicated blocks for portions of video decode and also have flexibility to permit support for optimizations and different video codecs. This enables ATI to provide smooth, glitch-free video decode with the lowest CPU utilization and the most forward compatibility.

ATI’s Avivo products have comprehensive decode support for MPEG-2, WMV9, and H.264.

H.264 is going to be a codec of great importance over the coming years, as it will be used for next-generation HD optical discs, such as HD-DVD and Blu-ray (see ATI’s whitepaper: Introduction to H.264). In May 2005, ATI demonstrated the first ever PC-based hardware acceleration for H.264 decode; this is a testament to the video expertise and flexibility upon which Avivo is built on.

Avivo Post-Processing
Vector Adaptive de-interlacing
Interlacing is a technique that has been in existence since the very beginning of video transmission. A key issue is that most displays today (including virtually every PC display) is actually a progressive scan device. This entails needing to convert interlaced video to progressive scan through a processing step called de-interlacing. While there is no single set way of performing this task, it is difficult (and computationally expensive) to do it well, with poor deinterlacing often showing jagged lines as an artifact.

With Avivo, ATI introduces a highly advanced de-interlacing scheme – vector adaptive - that excels even at the hardest of de-interlacing cases (such as low-angle diagonal lines). In this algorithm, Avivo-enabled hardware selects the best data to build a progressive frame from either the raw field data (when motion is detected to be low) or from a video data that is interpolated along several vectors. This ensures that the reconstructed (progressive) image maintains the greatest amount of data, delivering the best image possible.

Advanced scaling engines
Video and image scaling are critical elements to delivering a crisp final image; video in particular is often not at the resolution of the device it is going to be displayed on, so scaling it (up or down) while preserving detail and reducing aliasing is critical. ATI’s Avivo offers both pre- and post- scaling engines.

Avivo Display

Dual 10-bit end-to-end display processing

The Avivo Display Engine comprises two symmetrical display pipelines. These pipelines ensure that the output image (video or other) is best matched to the display device on which the image is being shown.

Operating at an industry-first 10 bits per color fidelity (30 bits total), these pipelines perform (in sequence):

• High-precision gamma correction. The gamma correction unit is capable of taking input of the typical 8 bits per color, all the way up to 16 bits per color in floating point format
• Color correction. A full color correction transformation is applied to every single pixel as it is output. This allows for both color space conversion (RGB to YPrPb or vice-versa) and for color correction (adjusting white point etc)
• Flexible scaling. Highly flexible scaling allows the source resolution to be scaled either up or down to match the display being driven. High-quality filtering allows for up to 10x6 taps to be used (10 horizontal samples on each of 6 lines contribute to each final pixel).
• Dithering. Because all of the processing is performed in 10 bits, the output of the display pipeline needs to be reduced to either 8 bit per color (typical desktop display) or 6 bits (typical notebook LCD). The dithering units combine both spatial and temporal dithering to deliver full 10 bit quality on almost any display.

All the above display-specific processing ensures that the image is tailored to the display. What is more, with two identical pipelines, the ability to drive two displays with the same features (tailored to two different displays, if applicable) becomes possible.

Ultimate Connectivity

In addition to superlative quality on the display pipelines, the Avivo Display Engine features unique connectivity capabilities to enable any PC usage that can be envisaged:

• True consumer electronics-grade TV output, via the consumer-proven Xilleon TV encoder (Xilleon is the name of ATI’s Digital Television line of products)
• VGA DACs use the 10 bits of data provided by the pipeline and output it directly, making any existing CRT a 10-bit device.
• HDMI support for connecting to a digital TV, which combines both the video image and audio into a single connection
• HDCP capability to enable the viewing of protected content
• Two dual-link DVI capability for support of high-resolution displays (over 1920x1200 resolutions on LCD displays)
• Unique ability to support high-bit-depth displays (10 or 16 bits per color)

The Video Pipeline – An Overview

From the time a video signal enters a system to the time the image is displayed on a TV or computer screen, it undergoes several steps of processing and format transformations. This is true whether we are talking about a PC or a consumer electronics (CE) device such as a TV or set-top box. These steps are communally referred to as the video pipeline. We will examine each of the key stages of the video pipeline.