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High throughput demands have resulted in enormous increase in complexity of multicast video applications, which require multiple video encoders to simultaneously compress individual views. In this paper, we present an approach to encode independent videos using H.264 intra encoder on a single hardware platform, where the hardware resources are shared by independent encoders in a time-multiplexed manner. In addition to lowering the latency introduced by multicasting, we address the strong sequential data dependencies within the encoder. At 25 frames/s, 150 MHz prototype of the proposed encoder and multiple video capture/display on a mid-range field programmable gate array is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a fault-tolerance technique for H.264's Context-Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) on unreliable computing hardware. The application-specific knowledge is leveraged at both algorithm and architecture levels to protect the CAVLC process (especially context adaptation and coding tables) in a reliable yet power-efficient manner. Specifically, the statistical analysis of coding syntax and video content properties are exploited for: (1) selective redundancy of coefficient/header data of video bitstreams; (2) partitioning the coding tables into various sub-tables to reduce the power overhead of fault tolerance; and (3) run-time power management of memory parts storing the sub-tables and their parity computations. Experimental results demonstrate that leveraging application-specific knowledge reduces area and performance overhead by 2x compared to a double-parity table protection technique. For functional verification and area comparison, the complete H.264 CAVLC architecture is prototyped on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA (though not limited to it). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]