Understanding the Application: An Overview of the H.264 Standard

Before any attempt to parallelize an application can be made, it is necessary to understand the application. Therefore, in this chapter we present a brief overview of the state-of-the-art H.264/AVC video coding standard. The H.264/AVC standard is based on the same hybrid structure as previous standards, but contains several new coding tools that increase the coding efficiency and quality. These new features increase the computational complexity of video encoding as well as decoding, however. Therefore, parallelism is a solution to obtain the performance required for real-time processing. The goal of this chapter is not to provide a detailed overview of H.264/AVC, but to provide sufficient background to be able to understand the remaining chapters.