Research On MPEG-2 To H.264/AVC Video Transcoding

With the rapid development of digital television and multimedia technology, video coding technology has greatly improved, several video coding standards have been issued and applied to different areas. As one of the most important technology for sharing multimedia resources and Universal Mutimedia Access(UMA), video transcoding has obtained much attentions of researchers . Video transcoding is defined as the conversion of one coded video stream to another, the transcoded video can meets various application requirements.MPEG-2 video coding standard has been widely used in consumer electronics, such as digital television and DVD, and accumulated abundant program resources. Comparing with other early video coding standards, H.264/AVC rapidly grows in recent years. H.264/AVC improved the compression efficiency by adopting many new algorithms. In the condition of similar picture quality, the coding bits of H.264/AVC streams is only about half of MPEG-2 streams. In addition, H.264/AVC also has the advantages such as, higher error-resilience ability, better network network interface etc.. With the development of wireless video transmission and network stream technology, H.264/AVC will be broadly used. As most programs are coded as MPEG-2 format, transcoding MPEG-2 resource to H.264/AVC format has become a new research issue in video area. In this paper, we exploited some research works on this MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoding.This paper firstly reviewd the video transcoding techniques, then summarized the key technologies and differences of MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC. Base on these, analyses of the primal issues of MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoder are presented; trasncoding architecture is also suggested. More over, some key algorithms, such as DCT coefficients based fast Intra/Inter Macro-Block mode decision algorithms are proposed. In order to testify the proposed method, we also designed a software MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoder. The efficiency of our transcoding algorithms are testified by the software transcoder. Transmitting and Capturing Digital TV Transport Stream (TS) are generally required in digital TV (DTV) products developing; DTV devices testing, DTV system supervising. For this purpose, DTV TS transferring/capturing hardware model based on USB2.0 interface has been developed. The second part of this paper summarizes the host software developing for the TS transferring/capturing model, which consists of developing USB device driver and application software in both Windows and Linux operation system.