Motion Compensation and Reconstruction of H.264/AVC Video Bitstreams using the GPU

Most modern computers are equipped with powerful yet cost-effective graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate graphics operations. Although programmable shaders on these GPUs were designed for the creation of 3-D rendering effects, they can also be used as generic processing units for vector data. This paper proposes a hardware Tenderer capable of executing motion compensation, reconstruction, and visualization entirely on the GPU by the use of vertex and pixel shaders. Our measurements show that a speedup of 297% can be achieved by relying on the processing power of the GPU, relative to the CPU. As an example, real-time playback of high-definition video (1080 p) was achieved at 62.0 frames per second, consuming only 68.2% of all CPU cycles on a modern machine.