H.264/AVC decoder parallelization and optimization on asymetric multicore platform using dynamic load balancing

We propose a new method for H.264/AVC parallel decoder implementation on the CELL Broadband Engine processor. To decode the full HD H.264 stream in real time, the high performance processing is required due to the high computation and complexity. Our decoder exploits the functional partition method to parallelize the H.264 decoder on multicore platform. The load of performance critical module is dynamically balanced with less computational module to fully utilize of the multicore processors. The experimental results of proposed load balancing method show that it runs about 1.4 times faster than the normal parallel decoder with same hardware requirement - 1 PPE and 3 SPEs. This result is more than 4 times faster performance than that of the single core decoder - PPE only.