Efficient video downscaling transcoder from MPEG-2 to H.264

The new H.264 video coding standard achieves significantly higher compression performance than MPEG-2. As the MPEG-2 is popular in digital TV, DVD, etc., bandwidth or memory space can be saved by transcoding those streams into H.264 in these applications. Unfortunately, the huge complexity keeps transcoding from being widely used in practical applications. This paper proposes an efficient transcoding architecture with a smart downscaling decoder and a fast mode decision algorithm. Using the proposed architecture, huge buffering memory space is saved and the transcoding complexity is reduced. Performance of the proposed fast mode decision algorithm is validated by experiments.