You may not have heard of Barco Silex, but you’ve likely used their chips at one point or another. Barco Silex is a provider of image compression technology for hardware including JPEG, JPEG2000 and VC-2 Low Delay. They licenses a wide range of video compression technology for integration in professional AV products, in the form of IP blocs for ASIC’s or FPGA’s.

At InfoComm, the will demonstrate its brand-new Viper boards that are made for IP over AV applications. For example, the Viper allows transport of 4K/UHD HDMI over a 1Gbit Ethernet cable.

The Viper product line consists of a transmit (TX) and receive (RX) boards. The TX board is used to interface the HDMI source and put the audio/video on the IP network. On the receiving end sit one or more RX boards that decompress the stream and hand it to the application’s display hardware. An alternative setup uses several TX boards, each adding a channel to the network, with the RX boards able to tune into each channel.

Built around a SoC FPGAs, the Viper board has built-in hardware compression/decompression based on Barco Silex’ acclaimed IP cores. The compression codec is VC-2 Low Delay (SMPTE 2042), which results in what they claim is lossless quality at an ultralow end-to-end delay of a mere 5ms at 60 fps. The video/audio path is processed in real-time within the FPGA fabric while the processor is handling all the control and configuration of the board. Both the FPGA firmware and the CPU software can be easily upgraded, making it future proof, and allowing OEM- or application-specific customization.

Here are all the specs on the boards.