Trends in hardware acceleration for digital video on personal computers
Ken Morse, Arturo A. Rodriguez · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1994
This article reviews the current hardware acceleration techniques employed for digital video capture/compression and playback/decompression, and discusses future implementations. We discuss current capture systems that employ either dedicated silicon or a high throughput processor to provide real-time capture and compression. The advantages offered by each approach are compared. Similarly, video decompression acceleration can take the form of dedicated silicon (e.g., MPEG, JPEG) or be implemented using a dedicated high throughput processor (e.g., DVI). Programmable devices allow new algorithmic implementations to be introduced without replacing the hardware system but may not offer the performance of dedicated devices. Decompression and display hardware subsystems also provide real-time functionality like color conversion, dithering, dynamic scaling with interpolation filters and other blitter functions. Finally, we discuss the process of mixing an independent display layer with the existing systems graphics output for display, and present new designs to combine the functionality of digital video with the system graphics controller to provide a totally integrated solution.