Driver for MPEG data onto IEEE 1394 bus interface

摘要

A device driver enables an application run by the Run Time Engine (RTE) of a MPEG set top box (receive/decoder) to access an IEEE 1394 interface bus to which a digital video recorder or similar may be connected. The receiver/decoder 2002 decodes a compressed MPEG-type signal, and is controlled by a remote controller handset (2026), through an interface in the receiver/decoder. The operation of the receiver/decoder is controlled by a virtual machine (VM) that includes the run time engine (RTE) (4008). The IEEE interface has features to which interface identifiers are assigned, though the identifiers may change after the occurrence of certain events on the interface. To cope with this possibility, the device driver stores logical identifiers corresponding to the respective interface identifiers and provides the logical identifiers to the application for directing communication associated with the corresponding feature between the device driver and the application. The device driver maintains the correspondence between the logical identifiers and the features independently of the interface identifier assigned to each feature so that communication between the application and the device driver directed using a given logical identifier can remain associated with the corresponding given feature following a change in the assignment of the corresponding interface identifier to the feature.