Efficient buffering control for a software-only, high-level, high-profile, MPEG-2 decoder

A high-quality MPEG-2 software decoder should support a good scalability performance for a wide range of video format, especially for the high-resolution MPEG-2 video (e.g., HDTV). However, it is found that the existing parallel decoder suffers significant performance degradation when decoding high-level MPEG-2 video with the full system configuration, due to inefficient management mechanism such that the memory space in the decoder. We propose an efficient buffer management mechanism such that the memory requirement is reduced by 50%. This is approached by two steps: first we use an ST scheme to minimize the transmission buffer in a slave node by allowing dynamic sharing between frames in one group of picture (GOP). Then we further reduce the buffer space by a dynamic buffer allocation according to image type. The revised parallel decode showed a satisfactory scale-up performance when decoding the high-resolution video formats.