MPEG-2 decoding in a stream programming language

Image and video codecs are prevalent in multime-dia devices, ranging from embedded systems, to desktop computers, to high-end servers such as HDTV editing consoles. It is not uncommon however that develop-ers create and customize separate coder and decoder implementations for each of the architectures they tar-get. This practice is time consuming and error prone, leading to code that is neither malleable nor portable. This paper describes an implementation of the MPEG-2 decoder using the StreamIt programming language. StreamIt is an architecture-independent stream lan-guage that aims to improve programmer productivity, while concomitantly exposing the inherent parallelism and communication topology of the application. The paper shows that MPEG is a good match for the stream-ing programming model and illustrates the malleability of the implementation using a simple modification to the decoder to support alternate color compression for-mats. StreamIt allows for modular application devel-opment, which increases code reuse, and reduces the complexity of the debugging process since stream com-ponents can be verified independently. This in turn leads to greater programmer productivity. 1