Real-Time Parallel MPEG-2 Decoding in Software
Report ID: TR-516-96Author: Fritts, Jason / Bilas, Angelos / Singh, Jaswinder Pal
Date: 1996-03-00
Pages: 21
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Abstract:
The growing demand for high quality compressed video has led to an increasing need for real-time MPEG-2 decoding. With the widespread availability of multiprocessors, a parallel software implementation provides an effective solution to the decoding problem. We present a parallel decoder for the MPEG-2 standard, implemented on both centralized and distributed shared memory machines. The goal of this work is to provide an all-software solution for real-time, high-quality video decoding and to investigate the important properties of this application as they pertain to multiprocessors systems. Both coarse and fine grained implementations are considered for parallelizing the decoder. The coarse-grained approach exploits parallelism at the group of pictures level, while the fine-grained approach parallelizes within frames, at the slice level. A comparative evaluation of these methods is made, with results presented in terms of speedup, memory requirements, load balance, synchronization time, and temporal and spatial locality.