Designed for Simplicity and Consistency

To ensure simplicity and ease of use, DHCAT is completely self-contained. All that’s needed to perform an assessment is a test platform and the tool’s installation DVD—nothing else. Because many test scenarios would require a TV signal input or a network target for outbound video streams, the development team created software implementations of a virtual TV tuner and digital media adapter (DMA).

The virtual TV tuner simulates how a TV tuner card would hand off an MPEG-2 encoded bit-stream to the system. However, DHCAT checks for the presence of a TV tuner card with hardware-based MPEG-2 encoding. If one is not found the system will score very poorly on DHCAT.

The virtual DMA provides a target device for an installed media server, and allows DHCAT to conduct streaming tests without being connected to a network. Unlike the approach with the virtual TV tuner, DHCAT does not check for the presence of a physical DMA on a network. These virtual peripherals allow the completion of a full test sequence without an external video signal generator, or physical DMA.

To simplify and standardize the tool’s interaction with the test system, the Intel® team designed DHCAT to abstract both the platform’s hardware and software elements. The tool will automatically detect and use whatever resources are present and running on the system, making it ideal for testing the “out of the box” experience.