H.264 Macroblock Line Level Parallel Video Decoding on Embedded Multicore Processors

The adaptation of intensive calculation algorithms made the new emerging H.264 an efficient video codec. On the other hand, embedded processors are equipped with multicore processors, thus offering additional processing power. The H.264 codec cannot benefit from this processing power in its current state. One solution is to execute the codec on different cores concurrently. H.264 codec is a complex video compression standard that is widely used in multimedia applications. In this paper, a new parallelization technique for the H.264 decoder is proposed based on Macroblock (MB) lines distribution of a video frame on a multicore architecture. A pipeline for the Entropy Decoder (ED) at the slice level is also applied in order to speed up the processing time. Simulations conducted with High Definition (HD) resolutions show an upper limit speedup of 4.7 using the Baseline profile and 3.2 using the Main profile on a 16-core embedded processor.