The Grand Alliance HDTV video encoder

Members of the digital HDTV Grand Alliance have jointly designed and constructed an MPEG-2 main profile, high level video encoder as part of an overall HDTV broadcast system. The encoder accepts video in either the 1080 line (30 Hz) interlaced format or the 720 line (60 Hz) progressive format, and produces an MPEG-2 MP@HL compliant bitstream. The encoder processing includes large-area motion estimation, adaptive telecine processing, and an advanced rate control mechanism. This paper describes the hardware architecture and trade-offs of this encoder.