Digital video on personal systems: implementation and performance

Abstract

The feasibility and performance issues of various types of digital video on personal systems are investigated. We distinguish digital video systems according to compression/decompression hardware, media storage types, and output mixing schemes, and examine them individually. Potential bottlenecks like I/O throughput, CPU cycles, system bus bandwidth are investigated according to different types of video applications. Performance information is collected to provide design guidance, specifically for CDROM-based, network-based, disk-based digital video applications. Finally, we investigate the design alternatives of software-only digital video, and the trade-offs between memory to VRAM transfer rate, cpu cycles for (de)compression, compression quality, and disk I/O throughput.