Fast Development with DaVinci On Screen Display (OSD)

While On Screen Display (OSD) functionality became prevalent as a cheaper alternative to using buttons/knobs to control television settings, in today's society, it seems like everyday a new gadget comes out which uses OSDs.

Imagine a video phone or set-top application for a minute; both of these applications require video overlaid with some graphics OSD, and may require some blending between video and a graphic (or OSD) plane. In order to come up with what the final screen will look like, engineers often go through several iterations of resizing video windows and rearranging graphic blocks. Each of these iterations comes at the cost of two precious resources: time and money. Now imagine you can draw your graphics in almost any open source or commercially available graphics program and quickly drop your new graphics (or OSD) into the screen to test how it would look before writing a single line of code, allowing you to quickly change your graphics and test how it looks quickly until you have it just right. You do not have to imagine anymore, DaVinci makes this a reality.

This application report will show how easy and fast it can be to test/implement your OSD ideas on Texas Instrument's DaVinci™ platform using a standard open source graphics editor (i.e. GIMP), and the power of the Linux operating system.