An efficient HEVC to H.264/AVC transcoding system

The latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) achieves significant compression performance improvement over Advanced Video Coding (AVC). The high compression efficiency of HEVC together with the wide availabilities of H.264/AVC decoders necessitates transcoding between these two technologies. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for software-based HEVC to H.264/AVC transcoding. By utilizing the information extracted from the input HEVC stream, the transcoding process can be accelerated with relatively minor compression efficiency loss. Experiment results show that the proposed transcoding algorithm can save around 60% of the time cost of re-encoding process compared with x264, one of the most widely used H.264 encoders, with very small loss of compression performance.