Software decoding of HDTV

We implemented a software decoder for HDTV MPEG-2 transport stream running on a standard processor with a multimedia instruction set. From the evaluation of the performance of this decoder it results that equivalent single processor of speed of about 1500-1800 MHz would be necessary to run the HDTV decoding entirely in software. This is confirmed by tests of the decoder with HDTV streams and with multi-threaded implementation of the decoder running on a multiprocessing workstation.