Real-time H264/AVC high definition video encoder on a multicore DSP TMS320C6678

In this paper, the newest Texas Instrument´s multicore DSP TMS320C6678 is used in order to perform a real-time H264/AVC high definition (HD) embedded video encoder. We exploit the high computing performance offered by this eight-core DSP in order to meet the real-time encoding compliant. To enhance the encoding speed, Frame Level Parallelism (FLP) approach is applied. A master core is reserved to handle data transfers to/from DSP. Multithreading algorithm combined with a ping-pong buffers technique are exploited in order to optimize the standard FLP approach and hide communication overhead. Experimental results show that our enhanced FLP implementation allows achieving real-time HD (1280×720) video encoding by reaching up to 26 f/s (frame/second) as encoding speed. Experiments show also that our parallel implementation, performed on seven C6678 DSP cores running each @ 1 GHz, allows accelerating the encoding run-time by a factor of 6,38 without inducing any quality degradation or bit-rate increase.