A Study Of Hardware Accelerated H.264Codec On Intel Platform And Its Application

The rapid development of network technology and the growing maturity of multimediacommunication technique promote the extensive application of video conferencing. Manycommunication system manufacturers, including Cisco, Polycom and Huawei, had launchedtheir own video conferencing products. All these products are based on embedded architecture,using custom chips to realize the audio and video processing operations. Such hardwaresolution provides high efficiency and good speed for video encoding and decoding, but at thesame time it has the defect of high price and poor flexibility. As the unceasing enhancement tothe performance of CPU, pure software-based video conferencing system emerges.Software-based video conferencing systems have advantages in price and flexibility. Butbecause of the limited processing capacity of CPU, this kind of system lacks the ability toprocess multiple720P or1080P HD videos concurrently. CPU is always under full loadcondition, which leads to unsatisfactory stability.For the past few years, the CPU industry was undergoing a stage of fusion. Manyspecial-purpose chips including GPU and video codec are integrated in CPU itself. In2011,Intel released the Quick Sync Video technology, which is a hardware video encoding anddecoding technology integrated into some Intel CPUs. Compared to traditional softwarecodecs that were implemented by open source libraries such as X264and FFMPEG, the QuickSync Video technology can shift the video processing workload from CPU to thespecial-purpose chip, which relieves the heavy burden on CPU and greatly increase the videoprocessing efficiency and performance.This thesis presents a design scheme that uses the Intel Media SDK to utilize theencoding and decoding acceleration capability on Intel platform. The implementationprocedure of the H.264codec is also introduced in this paper. Both of the encoder anddecoder are based on DirectShow framework, thus encapsulating in DirectShow Filter form.In this article, we also proposed the performance and parameter optimization solution specificto video conferencing application.By comparing the analyzing the test outcome, we can see that the hardware-acceleratedH.264codec of this paper can significantly reduce the CPU usage and improve the videoprocessing performance meanwhile retaining high flexibility and scalability. The schemeintroduced by this paper combines the merits of pure-hardware solution and pure-softwaresolution, which has a strong application value.