Acquiring video frames and processing pixels in Xilinx

For simulation I would suggest using a test image stored as a raw video file. Simulation and video acquisition won't play together, the time scales are off by many orders of magnitude.

Photoshop can store picture files in a raw format (just the R, G, B values in binary, with or without a header). There are other ways to get raw images into a file, but this is perhaps easiest. Simulation can get the data directly from the file. Having a constant test image is also useful for debugging errors. Trying to debug with ever-changing video input data is not fun.

Because simulation is slow, I would also suggest using a small (low resolution) image at first. You can test on larger images after compression is working on the small ones. Perhaps even do the larger image debug when you go to the hardware.

This is probably an ambitious project for someone "new to this FPGA thing." While ISE is probably sufficient to get the job done, you may want to look into the Embedded development software to simplify your job somewhat...

Good Luck, Gabor

Are you going to design in VHDL or Verilog?

Yes, but you will have to create a testbench including something that simulates a video signal. This would probably be a simple video generator that reads an image file or a series of image files.

If you don't meant to test the aquisition in simulation but only the processing, then use the other poster's suggestion and simply read image files into your processing buffers.