A study of concurrency in MPEG-4 video encoder

The traditional boundaries between the computer, TV/film industries and telecommunications, are blurring. Therein lies the focus of MPEG-4: the convergence of common applications of the above mentioned three industries. MPEG-4 aims to satisfy the new requirements and expectations, by providing an audio visual coding standard allowing for interactivity, high compression and universal accessibility. Moreover coding of video data is an important feature in digital industry and the MPEG-4 video encoder has to be able to encode efficiently visual information and probably in real time conditions. Therefore a lot of effort has been spent in real time video encoding and decoding issues using either hardware or software solutions. This paper addresses these issues by describing a parallel software implementation of the MPEG-4 video encoder using multithread techniques. A scheduling policy is proposed to guarantee via a buffer synchronisation a significant speed up which under some special circumstances reach an optimised load balancing solution. The proposed scheme is tested using the hardware resources of Unix multiprocessor hardware platform (running Solaris 2.0) by rewriting and modifying the current MPEG-4 encoder