A streaming implementation of HD H.264/AVC encoder on STORM processor

H.264/AVC significantly outperforms the previous video coding standards at the expense of a higher computational complexity. The complexity is even higher when H.264/AVC is used in applications with high bandwidth and high quality like real-time encoding of HD (High-Definition) video. However, the stream architecture such as STORM processor provides a powerful mechanism to achieve high performance in media processing and signal processing. In this paper, we describe a streaming implementation of HD H.264/AVC encoder on STORM processor. Based on the reference code's features, we proposed a suitable streaming method for every major process in H.264/AVC encoder. The experimental results show that our streaming implementation on STORM-SP16 G220 achieves the performance of 30.6 fps (frames per second) for a HDTV 1080P (1920×1080) sequence, satisfying the real-time requirement.