GPU Acceleration of H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC Software Video Encoder

H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC encoding of high-resolution video is still a heavy task for today's high-end PCs. To accelerate the H.264 software encoder, we utilize many-core GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). Because spatial and temporal data dependencies between macroblocks (MBs) limit the MB-level parallel processing, we propose a relaxation method of inter-MB dependencies and a frame-pipelining to obtain higher parallelism. Experimental results show that our GPU accelerated encoder runs more than 10 times faster than the CPU implementation while keeping the bit rate increase acceptably small. This encoder achieves 60 frames per second encoding of full-HD resolution videos.