With the wide variety of compressed and uncompressed video and audio interfaces and formats available, it’s inevitable that simple converter boxes will be needed around major installations to glue the network together. These simple but effective converters can take in a standard such as SDI and convert it to an HDMI output (or vice versa). Often capable of handling more than one channel, converters are typically low-cost and small form factor, so integration is key whilst not sacrificing any video or audio quality. Some converters offer video processing to scale from one format to another, or the latest versions will support the transition to IP networks.

Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGAs and Zynq-7000 SoCs offer cost effective, high performance hardware and software capabilities to support these applications, with the new UltraScale+ MPSoC with integrated features such as an H.265/HEVC Video Codec and enhanced graphics capabilities offering further benefits for next generation converters.