National Instruments (News - Alert) (NATI) has announced a performance testing analyzer for consumer devices such as set-top boxes (STBs), Blu-ray players, smartphones and tablets.

The NI PXIe-1491 digital audio and video analyzer for HDMI, DVI and mobile devices is built to provide automated, high-performance measurements to eliminate subjective manual inspection.

"The NI PXIe-1491 enables the audio/video analyzer industry to think beyond the manual solutions used today," said Charles Schroeder, director of marketing for test at National Instruments. "By automating the inspection process with our new, high-performance hardware and software, our customers can now guarantee the video quality of their HDMI and mobile devices with breakthrough efficiency and cost savings."

It ships with the NI Video Measurement Suite, a test suite for analyzing a wide variety of video standards. NI also offers add-ons, such as NI AudioMASTER software, designed for in-depth audio testing including frequency response and THD, and NI Picture Quality Analysis (PQA) software. NI PQA software delivers quality of experience (QoE) metrics such as peak signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index metric (SSIM). In addition, NI PQA software enables engineers to measure lip synch, macro blocking, dropped frames, pixelation and more in real time by combining PXI Express technology with highly parallelized measurement algorithms.

Beyond at-home consumer electronics, applications include testing of aerospace and defense systems, automobile rearview camera and infotainment systems, in-flight entertainment systems, video conferencing and professional audio/video equipment.