The Berkeley Software MPEG-1 Video Decoder

by:


Ketan Mayer-Patel
Department of Computer Science
U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599


Brian C. Smith
Tipping Point Technologies, Inc.
Austin, TX 78731

and
Lawrence A. Rowe
Computer Science Division - EECS
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1776

Abstract

This paper reprises the original description of the Berkeley software-only MPEG-1 video decoder originally published in the proceedings of the 1st International ACM Conference on Multimedia in 1993. The software subsequently became widely used in a variety of research systems and commercial products. Its main impact was to provide a platform for experimenting with streaming compressed video and to expose the strengths and weaknesses of software-only video decoding using general purpose computing architectures.

The paper compares the original performance results published in 1993 with experiments run on a modern processor to demonstrate the gains of processing power in the past ten years relative to this specific application and discusses the history of MPEG-1 video software decoding and the Berkeley MPEG research group.

To appear ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 2005.