A parallel ultra-high resolution MPEG-2 video decoder for PC cluster based tiled display systems

T his paper presents a hierarchical parallel MPEG-2 decoder for playing ultra-high-resolution videos on PC cluster based tiled display systems. To maximize parallelism while minimizing the communication requirements for a PC cluster, our algorithm uses a two-level splitter approach, where a root splitter splits an MPEG-2 video stream at the picture level and passes them to k second-level splitters, each of which splits the pictures into macroblocks and sends them to m x n decoders according to their screen locations. Our experiments with various configurations show that this system is highly scalable and has a low and balanced communication requirement among the PC nodes. On a 4 x 4 display wall system driven by 21 PCs, the implementation can play back a 3840 x 2800 video at 38.9 frames/second.