A Generic Design for Encoding and Decoding Variable Length Codes in Multi-codec Video Processing Engines

The growth of multimedia communication and the mobile convergence lead to a rapid increase in the market of portable multimedia applications. Many of these multimedia applications require supporting multiple codec standards. Although these codec standards are different, they share some common features which can be exploited for hardware implementations of an integrated multi-codec engine. Variable length coding is a lossless data compression technique adopted by most of the codecs. The existing implementations of variable length coding are specific to a particular codec and are not suitable for a multi-codec environment. We propose a methodology for efficiently implementing variable length coding in the multi-codec environment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology by comparing it with the existing implementations for MPEG4 and H.264.