METHOD OF AND APPARATUS FOR HANDLING HIGH BANDWIDTH ON - SCREEN - DISPLAY GRAPHICS DATA OVER A DISTRIBUTED IEEE 1394 NETWORK UTILIZING AN ISOCHRONOUS DATA TRANSMISSION FORMAT

摘要

On-screen-display graphics data is transmitted from a source device to a display device over an IEEE 1394-1995 serial bus network utilizing an isochronous data format. The on-screen-display graphics data is generated by the source device and transmitted to a display device, as a stream of isochronous data, separate from video data. Each packet of isochronous data within the stream of on-screen-display graphics data includes an address value corresponding to a memory address within the display device forming a buffer. When received by the display device the on-screen-display graphics data is loaded into the appropriate memory locations within the buffer corresponding to the address values. At the display device, an embedded stream processor is utilized to strip the header information from each packet and determine the appropriate memory location that the data is to be stored. A trigger packet is sent at the end of the data stream for a screen of on-screen-display graphics. The trigger packet includes a presentation time value corresponding to a display time for the screen of on-screen-display graphics. When the trigger packet is received, the display device transfers the data stored in the buffer to a VRAM circuit for display at the specified presentation time. The on-screen-display graphics data can be overlaid on video data for display and also displayed separately. Differential encoding is used when transferring frames of data wherein only a portion of data changes from the previous frame.