Scalable parallel processing for H.264 encoding application to multi/many-core processor

Although valuable, the high-quality video compression format H.264/AVC workload complicates real-time encoding. This paper describes scalable parallel processing for H.264/AVC. Macroblock (MB)-level decomposition is more scalable than conventional methods for increasing the number of multiple threads. Moreover, it presents memory bandwidth advantages. This parallel algorithm can be improved using a motion estimation algorithm that distributes the workload among threads. Complementary recursive cross search (CRCS) is used to achieve efficient video encoding using MB-level decomposition. With and without B-frames for HDTV, MB-level decomposition with CRCS can respectively increase the frame rate of the conventional method by 2.4 and 4.6 times. Furthermore, the method suppresses memory accesses despite higher processing efficiency. Results show that MB-level decomposition with CRCS is suitable for computing in the many-core processor era.