Management And Performance of Multiple Video Decoder Instances in Mobile Devices
Evangelos Alexiou, Emmanouil Potetsianakis, Emmanuel Thomas · 2024
Modern information exchange and telecommunication systems make immersive media increasingly more relevant. Immersive applications introduce challenges in ensuring optimal performance and scalability of media decoding, composition, and synchronization operations. Nowadays, a solution to accommodate media decoding in this context is to use multiple parallel video decoder instances instead of a single video decoder. This would require a robust and predictable decoder management system, coupled with dynamic buffer organization. In practice, however, this is often implemented without any special curation to manage the simultaneous video decoder instances, with resulting behaviour and implications not being fully understood yet. In this paper, we extend our previous work by utilizing the VidBench tool and investigate further the performance of modern chipsets integrated into Android-operated mobile devices in handling multiple video decoder instances running in parallel. Our results indicate the need for suitable synchronization solutions to counter uncertainty and variability across different video decoder instances and devices.