Performance evaluation of batch encodings in HEVC using slice level parallelism

Abstract

HEVC has emerged as the new video standard to replace H.264/AVC. Although the new standard is able to achieve significantly higher compression ratios compared to the older one, it entails high computational demands. To alleviate the problem, parallelism opportunities are offered by the standard at different levels namely, slice, tile and wave front. In this paper we evaluate the performance of slice level parallelism in HEVC encoding. Although significant previous work exists on slice parallelization, particularly for H.264/AVC, usually the experimental evaluation was limited to characterizing the performance when encoding one sequence at a time. Our focus is to evaluate slice parallelism when a batch of encoding jobs is submitted to the system, with CPU core requirements potentially exceeding the available resources. © 2016 ACM.