A multi-frame and multi-slice H.264 parallel video encoding approach with simultaneous encoding of prediction frames

This paper describes a novel multi-frame and multi-slice parallel video encoding approach with simultaneous encoding of predicted frames. The approach, when applied to H.264 encoding, leads to speedups comparable to those obtained by state-of-the-art approaches, but without the disadvantage of requiring bidirectional frames. The new approach uses a number of slices equal or greater than the number of cores used and supports three motion estimation modes. Their combination leads to various tradeoffs between speedup and visual quality loss. For an H.264 baseline profile encoder based on Intel IPP code samples running on a two quad core Xeon system (8 cores in total), our experiments show an average speedup of 7.20×, with an average quality loss of 0.22 dB (compared to a non-parallelized version) for the most efficiency motion estimation mode, and an average speedup of 7.95×, with a quality loss of 1.85 dB for the faster motion estimation mode.