An Evaluation of Parallelization Concepts for Baseline-Profile Compliant H.264/AVC Decoders

Due to the increasing performance requirements of decoding H.264/AVC in HDTV or larger resolutions, new approaches are necessary to enable real-time processing. According to the current trend to parallel computation in all performance classes, decoding of AVC must be mapped to these architectures even though this is complicated by the increased complexity and many data dependencies in the codec. We propose and evaluate different ways of using multithreading to speed-up our .NET implemented decoder. While slice based approaches scale best, this is not a flexible approach because of the reliance on specially encoded streams. Functional partitioning and macroblock pipelining prove to be a good alternative for almost all evaluated videos. Key words: AVC; H.264; Parallelization; Decoding; Evaluation; MultiThreading; Pipelining

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Klaus Schöffmann, Markus Fauster, Oliver Lampl, László Böszörményi
• Keywords: .NET Implemented Decoder, Distributed And Parallel Computing, EUROPAR 2007, Larger Resolutions, Slice Based Approaches