Flexible software decoding of digital video

Modern microprocessors and desktop systems are increasingly being designed for multimedia performance. Video, audio, and 3-D graphics processing require architecture which takes into account synchronous parallel processing of massive amounts of data in realtime. To deal with this type of processing multimedia insitruction sets are used. Multimedia processing poses also many problems on a system level. These problems are related to real time operation, task coordination and synchronization necessary for good perceptual effect. Typical example of multimedia processing is the decoding of digital video compressed in the MPEG-2 standard. In this paper we overview the problems of MPEG-2 decoding on standard microprocessors with multimedia instructions sets and different operating systems. We indicate that in a near future software-only digital television will be possible leading to deeper integration of broadcast and interactive services in the PC and set-top boxes.