Practical NDI Receivers Format Support

1) An SoC, or System on Chip, is an integrated circuit (IC) that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip. It may include a central processing unit (CPU), memory (RAM, ROM, and flash memory), input/output ports, and secondary storage – all on a single substrate or microchip. It can also contain other components such as a graphics processing unit (GPU), a network interface for communications, and specialized hardware accelerators for specific tasks like digital signal processing (DSP), encryption, or A/V Codecs.

(2) A VCU, or Video Codec Unit, is a specialized hardware module or component designed to handle the encoding and decoding of video streams. Note that the term VCU seems to be mainly used by AMD for their Zynq series of FPGAs. For instance, other SoCs such as Ambarella just call it a codec. The primary function of a VCU is to efficiently compress (encode) raw video data to reduce its size for storage or transmission and decompress (decode) video data for playback. By performing these operations in hardware, a VCU can significantly speed up video processing tasks, reduce CPU load, and decrease power consumption, which is especially beneficial in devices where power efficiency and high-performance video processing are critical.

Integrating a VCU within a System on Chip (SoC) or as part of a dedicated video processing card allows for efficient handling of video content, making it a critical component for multimedia applications and devices in today's video-centric digital world.

(3) An FPGA-based encoder/decoder requires an SoC to be able to offer the user interface, the memory, the network interface of the system, etc.