Performance Evaluation of Parallel MPEG-4 Video Coding Algorithms on Clusters of Workstations

During the last decade a lot of research and development efforts have been made to design competitive video codecs for several kinds of multimedia applications. Some video encoders like MPEG-4 and H.264 exhibit a very high computational cost, particularly in the case of high quality video sequences. Then, it is very difficult to find software solutions that efficiently code high-quality video in real-time or faster. We propose and evaluate several parallel implementations of the MPEG-4 standard encoder on clusters of workstations. We have performed extensive experiments showing that coding speed can be improved to more than double real-time requirements, being coding efficiency the same than the one in the sequential version.