Real-time PC-based software implementation of H.261 video codec

The complexity of a video codec has made it seems impossible to accomplish an audio-visual application without using application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). However, the advances in the computing power of microprocessors have made the development of software-based multimedia applications more feasible. More and more complicated tasks with a heavy computation load can be realized on the basis of the general purpose CPU. A PC-based software H.261 video codec, which is suitable for real-time constraint applications such as the video-phone and video-conferencing, is presented. The whole video codec system works on the Pentium-133.