Design and implementation of a Java-based MPEG-1 video decoder

Although Java has many useful programming language features for developing consumer multimedia applications, it is not widely used for multimedia application development. One of the main reasons for the lack of Java usage in consumer multimedia application development is a concern for the execution speed of Java-based applications. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using Java as a language for multimedia applications. As a specific multimedia application example, we have developed a Java-based MPEG-1 video decoder. We describe the design and implementation of the MPEG-1 video decoder and report our experience in optimizing the decoding performance. Based on the performance analysis results from a Java performance profiler, we have applied both general and Java-specific optimization techniques. The final implementation could decode about 28.67 frames per second on a Pentium-II 300 MHz computer for a 240×170 MPEG-1 video bitstream, a speed-up of 2.8 times over the initial implementation. Our experience strongly suggests that the pure Java-based media processing is a feasible solution.