Design and implementation of a real time high quality DV digital video software encoder

This paper addresses issues in the design and implementation of real time high quality DV video encoder in software. Such software assumes importance in PC based capture-encode-edit-transcode-store applications, which are gaining immense popularity because of the cost advantages with software only systems, possible now due to rapid increase in native signal processing power of a PC. A method to distribute bits within the video segment to yield the best possible quality at the fixed bit rate is suggested. A novel solution to the problem of macroblock quantization number selection with minimal quantization-variable length encoding cycles is also proposed, which is the major efficiency bottleneck in software DV encoding. Our software encodes faster than real time PAL and NTSC video on a Pentium-4 2.0 GHz PC at high quality.