A distributed real-time multi-view video encoder on consumer hardware

Abstract

In this paper we describe a novel approach to create standard-compliant H.264/MVC video streams in realtime by distributing most of the computational complexity among multiple H.264/AVC encoders which can be part of the capturing cameras or separate devices in between the cameras and the transcoder. By exploiting the structural similarities between H.264/AVC and H.264/MVC the transcoder only has to decode its individual input streams at a very high level. With minimal changes to the input streams a standard-compliant multi-view video stream is created. This method is efficient enough that a high number of input streams can be transcoded on a consumer multi-core PC.