Accelerating H.264 inter prediction in a GPU by using CUDA

H.264/AVC defines a very efficient algorithm for the inter prediction but it takes too much time. With the emergence of general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), a new door has been opened to support this video algorithm into these small processing units. In this paper, a forward step is developed towards an implementation of the H.264/AVC inter prediction algorithm into a GPU using compute unified device architecture (CUDA). The results show a negligible rate distortion drop with a time reduction on average up to 93.6%.