MPEG4 Realtime Encoder for Multi-channel DVR Systems

Recently, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and H.263 are still used in the industry, and more efficient video codecs such as MPEG-4 and H.264 are widely used. These video codecs provide better picture quality, higher coding efficiency, and more error robustness. However, it is difficult to apply these codecs to multi-channel environment such as DVR systems, because these codecs require high computational complexity. In order to apply MPEG-4 video codecs to multi-channel DVR systems, low-cost motion estimation method and simple quantization method are required. In this paper, we propose an MPEG-4 codec for PC-based DVR systems that provide multi-channel encoding and decoding in real-time. The experimental results show that the proposed codec can encode 24-channel in real-time at 28.5-30 frames per second.