New generation of real-time software-based video codec: Popular Video Coder II (PVC-II)

A new generation of real-time software-based video coder, the Popular Video Coder II (PVC-II), is presented.. The transform and the motion estimation parts are removed and the quantizer and the entropy coder are modified in the PVC-II as compared with the traditional video coder. Moreover, the PVC-II improves the coding performance of its previous version, the Popular Video Coder, by introducing several newly developed efficient coding techniques, such as the adaptive quantizer, the adaptive resolution reduction and the fixed-model intraframe DPCM, into the codec. The coding speed, compression ratio and picture quality of the PVC-II are good enough for applying it to various real-time multimedia applications. Since no compression hardware is needed for the PVC-II to encode and decode video data, the cost and complexity of developing multimedia applications, such as video phone and multimedia e-mail systems, can be largely reduced