Abstract: A home-control platform and architecture includes a plurality of serial buses that provide communications among processing devices that are connected to the home-control platform. A bus control unit is configured to allocate the buses among the devices that request communications services. The platform supports one or more control processors that provide an interface to legacy devices, user and network interfaces, browsers, and the like. The platform also accepts optional plug-in cards that perform as coprocessors for specific tasks, such as MPEG encoding and decoding, signal processing, video and audio CODECs, and so on. The software architecture employed to support this platform includes the use of a real-time microkernel Operating System (OS) at the control processors that interfaces with the task coprocessors, and interfaces with a standard OS, such as Vxworks, WinCE, or LINUX.

Abstract: A home-control platform and architecture includes a plurality of serial buses that provide communications among processing devices that are connected to the home-control platform. A bus control unit is configured to allocate the buses among the devices that request communications services. The platform supports one or more control processors that provide an interface to legacy devices, user and network interfaces, browsers, and the like. The platform also accepts optional plug-in cards that perform as coprocessors for specific tasks, such as MPEG encoding and decoding, signal processing, video and audio CODECs, and so on. The software architecture employed to support this platform includes the use of a real-time microkernel Operating System (OS) at the control processors that interfaces with the task coprocessors, and interfaces with a standard OS, such as Vxworks, WinCE, or LINUX.

Abstract: A Time Based Correction (TBC) method for digital synchronization of video signals. The time based correction method may be used for satellite based communications to keep clocks synchronized in a multimedia system. Digital receiver clock phases are compared to measure synchronization. The method includes an initialization procedure (tbcInit) that initializes algorithm variables and sets up an initial phase; a measurement procedure (tbcGetPhase) that measures the current phase; and a tracking procedure (tbcAdjust) that makes periodic adjustments to the output clock (VO_CLOCK).