H.263 video decoding on programmable graphics hardware

Mobile devices like PDAs and mobile phones include advanced multimedia processing capabilities especially in the area of audio, imaging and video. High performance graphics processing is emerging to the mobile devices in near future. Recent development in 3D graphics acceleration hardware has brought higher performance but also versatile and programmable 3D acceleration architectures. These programmable architectures can be utilized also for other purposes than graphics processing. In this paper we describe how graphics hardware can be used for video decoding based on the h.263 standard. In our implementation we have used OpenGL graphics API to program the graphics hardware. It is shown that programmable graphics hardware can be used for video processing with some limitations