Conley, Rose & Tayon, PC
System and method for transferring concurrent multi-media streams over a loosely coupled I/O bus
 A multimedia system including a PCI bus master controller for transferring concurrent and independent video and audio data streams to video and audio devices. The controller includes a video request and DMA channel, a video sub-picture request and DMA channel, an audio request and DMA channel, and a decompressed video DMA and posted request channel for independently and concurrently transferring the data streams from host memory to the devices. The host processor builds lists of request packets in system memory and asynchronously submits the request packets to the controller. The request packets include commands which the request channels execute. The commands may include spinning on status conditions in registers of the multimedia devices, writing to registers of the devices, or performing bus master transfers of multimedia data streams from system memory to the devices. The device register accesses are performed by the controller on local buses thereby reducing PCI bus traffic. 
Compaq Computer Corporation
H H G
H04N H04N G06F
additional inventional inventional
Michael P. Thanh T. Thomas J.
Moriarty Tran Bonola