A scalable parallel H.264 decoder on the cell broadband engine architecture

Michael A. Baker, Pravin Dalale, Karam S. Chatha, Sarma Vrudhula

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

The H.264 video codec provides exceptional video compression while imposing dramatic increases in computational complexity over previous standards. While exploiting parallelism in H.264 is notoriously difficult, successful parallel implementations promise substantial performance gains, particularly as High Definition (HD) content penetrates a widening variety of applications. We present a highly scalable parallelization scheme implemented on IBM's multicore Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) and based on FFmpeg's open source H.264 video decoder. We address resource limitations and complex data dependencies to achieve nearly ideal decoding speedup for the parallelizable portion of the encoded stream. Our decoder achieves better performance than previous implementations, and is deeply scalable for large format video. We discuss architecture and codec specific performance optimizations, code overlays, data structures, memory access scheduling, and vectorization.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationEmbedded Systems Week 2009 - 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Hardware/Software-Co-Design and System Synthesis, CODES+ISSS 2009
Pages353-362
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
EventEmbedded Systems Week 2009, ESWEEK 2009 - 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Hardware/Software-Co-Design and System Synthesis, CODES+ISSS 2009 - Grenoble, France
Duration: Oct 11 2009Oct 16 2009

Publication series

NameEmbedded Systems Week 2009 - 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Hardware/Software-Co-Design and System Synthesis, CODES+ISSS 2009

Other

OtherEmbedded Systems Week 2009, ESWEEK 2009 - 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Hardware/Software-Co-Design and System Synthesis, CODES+ISSS 2009
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityGrenoble
Period10/11/0910/16/09

Keywords

  • Cell broadband engine
  • Code overlay
  • H.264
  • MPEG4
  • Multicore
  • Parallel
  • Scalable
  • Video

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software

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