Exploring nvidia-cuda for video coding

Today, world is rapidly turning to high definition multimedia. From engineering and programming point of view, this usually means more computation is needed and more memory space is required to achieve these higher qualities. In this paper we explore the use of parallelization opportunities in graphics processors to accelerate video encoding. We evaluate the NVIDIA CUDA[1] toolkit and evaluate the performance of motion estimation in video encoding. The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the capabilities of NVIDIA/CUDA and develop a process for implementing video/multimedia applications. We have discovered that the difference in performance when CUDA is not used properly can be over 100x. We show how we were able to use CUDA capabilities to reduce the motion estimation time from 7000 milli seconds to 70 milli seconds