Overview
We decided to implement an MPEG-1 video codec due to its popular use
in storage media such as CD-ROM. It consists of: frame coding (DCT,
quantization), motion compensation, and entropy coding for both
encoding and decoding. It is interoperable with regular commercial
video players, encoders, and files. While the main performance
bottleneck of the encoder is motion estimation with half-pel, our project
takes advantage of Intel MMX's instruction set for parallel execution. This
let our codec out-perform other implementations. The development
platform is UNIX; code is written in C. Though implementation take
advantage of Intel microarchitecture features, code is flexible and
easily compiled in various environments, such as SUN, HP, SGI, and
Linux.