Frame-rate performance modeling of software MPEG decoder
Victor Ramamoorthy · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
A software MPEG decoder, though attractive in terms of performance and cost, opens up new technical challenges. The most critical question is: When does a software decoder drop a frame? How to predict its timing performance well ahead of its implementation? It is not easy to answer these questions without introducing a stochastic model of the decoding time. With a double buffering scheme, fluctuations in decoding time can be smoothed out to a large extent. However, dropping of frames can not be totally eliminated. New ideas of slip and asymptotic synchronous locking are shown to answer critical design questions of a software decoder. Beneath the troubled world of frame droppings lies the beauty and harmony of our stochastic formulation.