MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoder on TI TMS320DM642

The technology behind H.264, a joint video coding standard by ITU-T and ISO, offers a significant reduction in bit-rate over earlier standards-based technologies such as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. Such a compression efficiency advantage spurs its adoption in personal video recorders and in network edge servers that stream content over various last mile solutions that have limited bandwidth. This requires transcoding from an MPEG-2 format which is the most prevalent format that is used in terrestrial/satellite/cable transmission of digital television content. The substantial difference between MPEG-2 and H.264 necessitates almost a complete decoding followed by a re-encoding solution, instead of a compressed domain or minimal draft based low-complexity transcoding solution. We present an embodiment of a low-complexity MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoding algorithm and a general-purpose DSP based solution implemented on TI´s TMS320DM642 processor