Multimedia processing system architecture

A multimedia processing system for performing a plurality of multimedia tasks on multimedia data, comprising:

• at least one communication bus to carry multimedia data flows between multimedia processing blocks;
• a plurality of said multimedia processing blocks to run part or all of operations required to perform a multimedia task, each multimedia processing block containing at least one input interface to connect in receive mode to said at least one communication bus, and/or at least one output interface to connect in send mode to said at least one communication bus, with at least one of the input interfaces and one of the output interfaces comprising several ports to be connected to respective communication buses;
• and
• an application interface to manage said multimedia processing blocks, with said application interface selecting for each multimedia task a subset of the multimedia processing blocks to be assembled to run said multimedia task, and examining the input and output interfaces of said selected multimedia processing blocks to check whether all multimedia data exchanges to perform the corresponding multimedia task are possible within said subset and determine, for these exchanges, an encoding format of the multimedia data to be exchanged and the communication buses to be used to connect the different multimedia processing blocks of said subset two-by-two according to complementarity of the ports of their respective input and output interface.

A method for performing a plurality of multimedia tasks on multimedia data in a multimedia processing system comprising

• at least one communication bus to carry multimedia data flows between said multimedia processing blocks,
• a plurality of the multimedia processing blocks to run part or all of operations required to perform a multimedia task, each multimedia processing block containing at least one input interface to connect in receive mode to said at least one communication bus, and/or at least one output interface to connect in send mode to said at least one communication bus, with at least one of the input interfaces and one of the output interfaces comprising several ports to be connected to respective communication buses, and
• an application interface to manage said multimedia processing blocks, the method comprising:
• the application interface selecting for each multimedia task a subset of the multimedia processing blocks to be assembled to run said multimedia task;
• the application interface examining the input and output interfaces of said selected multimedia processing blocks to check whether all multimedia data exchanges to perform the corresponding multimedia task are possible within said subset;
• and
• the application interface determining, for these exchanges, an encoding format of the multimedia data to be exchanged and the communication buses to be used to connect the different multimedia processing blocks of said subset two-by-two according to complementarity of the ports of their respective input and output interface.