MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoder on TI TMS320DM642
Arvind Raman, Karan Singh, M.A. Mohan, N. Shigihalli, Sriram Sethuraman, B.S. Supreeth · 2004
The technology behind H.264, a joint video coding standard by ITU-T and ISO, offers a significant reduction in bit-rate over earlier standards-based technologies such as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. It offers a nearly 50% reduction in bitrate over MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile tools and a nearly 65% reduction in hitrate over MPEG-2 Main Profile tools at a comparable quality. Such a compression efficiency advantage spurs its adoption in personal video recorders (to increase the hours of stored content) and in network edge servers that stream content over various last mile solutions that have limited bandwidth. This requires transcoding from an MPEG-2 format which is the most prevalent format that is used in terrestrial/satellite/cable transmission of digital television content. The compression advantage, however, comes at the expense of three to four times higher computational complexity for the various coding tools employed in H.264.