FPGA as an EDGE Device

One of the most consumed forms of entertainment in our times is video streaming. Millions of people stream videos every day from streaming services. There is a large number of online service providers that provide these streaming services to the end users. However, a typical video can exist in multiple video formats. On top of this, not all streaming devices support all formats; for example, some smartphones do not support H.265 or HEVC video standard. With the possibility of having different video formats, an input source video may differ from an output video, a scenario that typically occurs when the raw video is captured and encoded in one format and the streaming service provider converts the encoded video into another format for its consumers. This conversion is known as transcoding. Video transcoding involves dynamically changing coding parameters such that it provides end-systems heterogeneity and the video format becomes portable among many other benefits.

It must be noted that video transcoding is a complex, heavy computational operation and due to this reason, it is not performed on any edge device generally. In order to mitigate or even eliminate these issues, a hardware implementation of video transcoding using an SoC FPGA is used. Using this design not only improves execution time of the video transcoding process but it also increases the data security aspect. Having the SoC FPGA connected to a wireless communication module, it can transmit the transcoded video to a video streaming service provider smoothly. Moreover, since the SoC FPGA supports wired communication standards, it can be locally and securely attached. Besides the small size and very low weight, SoC FPGAs are highly secure.