A flexible and high-performance hardware video encoder architecture

This paper presents a new video encoder architecture for H.264 and AVS, which adopts a novel macroblock (MB) encoding order. As a replacement of Level C+ zigzag coding order, the so-called Level C+ slash scan coding order with NOP insertion is used as MB scheduling to remove MB-level data dependency of the pipeline so that the left MB´s coded results such as motion vector (MV) and reconstructed pixels can be obtained early in motion estimation (ME) stages. As a result, by sharing the reconstruction (REC) loop, sequential intra prediction (INTRA) can be split into multiple pipeline stages to explore more block-level parallelization and rate distortion optimization (RDO) based mode decision is apt to implement. The exact MV predictors (MVP) obtained in motion estimation can not only improve coding performance but also make pre-skip ME algorithm able to be applied into this architecture for low power applications. Since the proposed scheme is attributed to Level C+ data reuse, the bandwidth is decreased greatly. A real-time high-definition (HD) 1080P AVS encoder implementation on FPGA verification board with search range [-128, 128]×[-96, 96] and two reference frames at an operating frequency of 160 MHz validates the efficiency of proposed architecture.