VP8 Encoder — Cost effective implementation

VP8 is an open source video compression format released by Google. This format is being accepted in many industry applications like HTML5, Web Real-Time Communication, and Video playback in different browsers etc. There is indeed an industry/market demand to support this format at full-HD resolution. This paper proposes the cost effective implementation of VP8 hardware (HW) encoder in terms of time saving in designing most of the complex algorithms. This involves the re-use of most of the H.264 hardware blocks, resulting is cost/area saving of VP8 Encoder. The work also describes the approach on how to adapt H.264 motion estimation, intra prediction & rate control algorithms in VP8 HW encoder implementation and the impact on quality achieved. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides comparable quality with Google´s VP8 reference Encoder (libvpx 0.9.7 (Cayuga) with “- good - cpu-used=5” settings) [6].