> You wont be able to be video-format-agnostic for a number of
> reasons :
>
> To properly CHAR insert you need to phase-lock to the incomming Line
> Sync
> (often called GenLock) - if you do not do this, the chars jitter about
> as you
> have two clock domains.

No, in my design all the video processing is done in a processing clock
domain
that is bridged to the input video clock domain by asynchronous FIFOs.
What you are describing should not be a problem in my system.
Each pixel carries three flags: frame start, line start, and valid
data.
Video timing counters increment as appropriate when each of these flags
is observed in
a given video processing block.

>
> You also need to Sync to Frame, and count lines, to decide when to
> start the CHAR insert-stream.

I realize that lines need to be counted, and position in the current
frame kept track of,
and thus you need to know the number of valid/blank pixels and lines
and count them while
the system is online.
But these parameters could be set as generics or package constants or
even passed in
to registers at run time (if we wanted the char-gen scheme to be
resolution and timing agnostic).

This is the kind of block I am looking for. But it looks as if no-one
knows of something like this floating around on the web.