Intel® FPGA Streaming Video Protocol Specification

ID 683397
Date 5/15/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

2.1. Metapackets (Full Variants)

Metapackets usually carry control information. Use metapackets in the full variant of the Intel FPGA streaming video protocol but not in the lite variant. Metapacket lengths are between 1 to 4 beats (clock cycles).
Figure 6. Intel FPGA streaming metapacket (full variant only)The figure shows a packet where TUSER[1] is high in beat 0, which shows this packet is a metapacket.

TUSER[1] is decoded during the first valid beat of the packet (beat 0 in the figure) and a high value indicates the start of a new metapacket. TUSER[0] and TUSER[1] should be low for the remainder of the packet.

Table 2.  TUSER bits decode (Full variants only)
TUSER[1:0] Meaning
00 Video packet (from either an interlaced (F0 or F1) field or progressive frame).
01 Video packet (start of either an interlaced (F0 or F1) field or progressive frame).
10 Metapacket.
11 Reserved.

Metapackets carry their information in the low 16 bits of TDATA. The protocol does not require any additional TDATA bits. The protocol defines different metapacket types, each with a 5 bit packet identifier carried in the 5 LSBs of the first beat of the packet.

Figure 7. Metapacket format

The protocol classifies metapackets into image information, end of field, auxiliary control and user-defined auxiliary control packets.

Table 3.  Metapacket types
Packet identifier Packet type
0 Image information
1 End of field
Auxiliary control packets
2 Timestamp
3 Register update
4 Commit
5-15 Reserved
User-defined auxiliary control packets
16 - 31 General-purpose user