Dynamic macroblock wavefront parallelism for parallel video coding

•Detail performance analysis of the traditional macroblock row wavefront (MRW) parallelism.•A new dynamic macroblock wavefront (DMW) parallelism.•An efficient implementation of video encoder with DMW.

Wavefront parallelism is effective for parallel video encoding thanks to its merits of low latency, no quality loss and high degree of parallelism. In traditional video encoders, macroblock row wavefront (MRW) parallelism was widely adopted. However the performance of MRW is limited by workload unbalance and computing resource unbalance among multiple work threads. This paper proposes a new dynamic macroblock wavefront (DMW) parallelism to alleviate the limitations of MRW. In DMW, the available macroblocks (MBs) are scheduled to work threads MB by MB other than MB row by MB row; and after one MB is encoded by a work thread, the MB on its right (if available) has the highest priority to be scheduled to avoid synchronization delay. Experimental results demonstrate that video encoder with traditional MRW can be accelerated by more than 10% with our proposed DMW. When hyper-threading is used, the advantage of DMW is more prominent.