MPEG-2 decoding in a stream programming language

Image and video codecs are prevalent in multimedia devices, ranging from embedded systems, to desktop computers, to high-end servers such as HDTV editing consoles. It is not uncommon however that developers create and customize separate coder and decoder implementations for each of the architectures they target. This practice is time consuming and error prone, leading to code that is neither malleable nor portable. This paper describes an implementation of the MPEG-2 decoder using the StreamIt programming language. StreamIt is an architecture-independent stream language that aims to improve programmer productivity, while concomitantly exposing the inherent parallelism and communication topology of the application. The paper shows that MPEG is a good match for the streaming programming model and illustrates the malleability of the implementation using a simple modification to the decoder to support alternate color compression formats. StreamIt allows for modular application development, which increases code reuse, and reduces the complexity of the debugging process since stream components can be verified independently. This in turn leads to greater programmer productivity.