A DVB-T Implementation for Android Stagefright on a Heterogeneous Multi-core Platform

Nowadays, with rapidly innovated technology, a mobile device used only as an information management tool and a communication gear could not meet users´ basic requirement. It must be able to play as entertainment equipment as well. Android is a Linux based software development platform mainly used for the mobile devices and provides a media framework to integrate all the software modules and device drivers, including information, communication, and entertainment technologies, and to congregate and simplify the variety of developing procedures for multimedia applications. Although this media framework is very suitable for the video and audio decoding, it is not sufficient for the digital video broadcast for Terrestrial (DVBT) application due to lack of the protocol support of digital television from the Android. This paper offers a mechanism to realize the DVB-T technology on the Android platform with a heterogeneous multi-core system. To consider the computing capability of each core and limited memory space in mobile devices, further task assignments between cores to maximize its efficiency and analyses for video buffer size are also presented. In this paper, the performance achieves DVB-T real-time decoding and A/V synchronization with one ARM core (204 MHz) and dual PACDSPs (204 MHz).