Parallelization of MPEG-2 video encoder for parallel and distributed computing systems

In this paper, a parallel implementation of the MPEG-2 video encoder on various parallel and distributed platforms is presented. We use a data-parallel approach and exploit parallelism within each frame, which makes our encoder suitable for real-time applications where the complete video sequence may not be present on the disk. The Express environment is employed as the underlying message-passing system making our encoder portable across a wide range of parallel and distributed architectures. The encoder also provides control over various parameters such as number of processors, size of search window, buffer management and bit-rate. It is flexible and allows inclusion of fast and new algorithms for different stages of the codec, replacing current algorithms. Comparisons of execution times, speedups as well as frame encoding rates using different number of processors are provided. In addition, our study reveals the degrees of parallelism and bottlenecks in various computational modules of MPEG-2.