Video CODEC Design

In this chapter we bring together some of the concepts discussed earlier and examine the issues faced by designers of video CODECs and systems that interface to video CODECs. Key issues include interfacing (the format of the input and output data, controlling the operation of the CODEC), performance (frame rate, compression, quality), resource usage (computational resources, chip area) and design time. This last issue is important because of the fast pace of change in the market for multimedia communication systems. A short time-tomarket is critical for video coding applications and we discuss methods of streamlining the design flow. We present design strategies for two types of video CODEC, a software implementation (suitable for a general-purpose processor) and a hardware implementation (for FPGA or ASIC).