Performance optimization of the MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 video transcoder

Hari Kalva, Anthony Vetro, Huifang Sun, Jose F. Lopez, Juan A. Montiel-Nelson, Dimitris Pavlidis
2003 VLSI Circuits and Systems  
The MPEG-2 compressed digital video content is being used in a number of products including the DVDs, camcorders, digital TV, and HDTV. The ability to access this widely available MPEG-2 content on low-power end-user devices such as PDAs and mobile phones depends on effective techniques for transcoding the MPEG-2 content to a more appropriate, low bitrate, video format such as MPEG-4. In this paper we present the software and algorithmic optimizations performed in developing a real time MPEG-2
more » ... o MPEG-4 video transcoder. A brief overview of the transcoding architectures is also provided. The transcoder was targeted and optimized for Windows PCs with the Intel Pentium-4 processors. The optimizations performed exploit the SIMD parallelism offered by the Intel's Pentium-class processors with MMX support. The transcoder consists of two distinct components: the MPEG-2 video decoder and the MPEG-4 video transcoder. The MPEG-2 video decoder is based on the MPEG-2 Software Simulation Group's reference implementation while MPEG-4 transcoder is developed from scratch with portions taken from the MOMUSYS implementation of the MPEG-4 video encoder. The optimizations include: 1) generic block-processing optimizations that affected both the MPEG-2 decoder and the MPEG-4 transcoder and 2) optimizations specific to the MPEG-2 video decoder and the MPEG-4 video transcoder. The optimizations resulted in significant improvements both in MPEG-2 decoding as well as the MPEG-4 transcoding. With optimizations, the total time spent by the transcoder was reduced by over 82% with MPEG-2 decoding reduced by over 56% and MPEG-4 transcoding reduced by over 86%.
doi:10.1117/12.498998 fatcat:x74kn36lbbcfxb4sq6pq3h3sru