HAVi and IEEE 1394 Standard Activities
In the near future, Consumer Electronics devices will be interconnected to facilitate shared access to content, services, and control & command functions. The HAVi goal is to facilitate plug & play interoperability of AV devices using the IEEE 1394 cable interface. Typical home devices targeted by HAVi include DTV, VCR, DVD, and Camcorders. HAVi addresses the complete set of requirements for networked AV equipment including: discovery of connected devices, description of capabilities, control, and most importantly, delivery of content (usually MPEG content) with guaranteed QoS implicitly done by adopting IEEE 1394.
Background & Objective: MDEA introduced the first HAVi products (HDTV and HD D-VHS VCR) to the market in 2001. The main objective is to conduct research on innovative networking areas for introduction into the various standardization processes such as HAVi, IEEE 1394.x and 1394TA.
Technical Discussion: IEEE 1394 provides a good networking foundation for Consumer Electronics devices. Hot plug and play, high data rate, and QoS support are among others, the key benefits. Being IEEE1394 a specification for layers 1,2 and 3, it does not provide any interoperability guarantee among devices implementing dissimilar higher layers. As an attempt to solve this problem, HAVi is a framework built on top of IEEE 1394 and complemented by other AV specifications like IEC 61883 and AV/C. HAVi enables AV devices to interoperate by defining a set of generic APIs which cover a great percentage of current devices. Future proof is achieved by the support of byte-code (HAVi adopted Java) that can run on any device. Future devices will simply contain their own byte-code that can be uploaded into other devices in the network without the need for any device to have any a priori knowledge. Once the connectivity problem among AV devices is solved, the next step is connectivity to other clusters and/or external networks.
Technology Areas:
Advanced Digital Television
Networks
Modification Date: July 23, 2003