A H.264 video coprocessor for mobile DVB-H terminals

The new DVB-H standard allows broadcasting of audio/video content to mobile terminals. Such devices underlie severe restrictions concerning computational power and power consumption. The most computational intensive and therewith most power consuming part of such terminals is the decoding of the H.264/AVC video datastream. We present optimization strategies for software-based H.264/AVC video decoding as well as the architecture of a H.264/AVC decoding companion chip with specialized coprocessors, which target the above mentioned restrictions.