Video and database interface with efficient MPEG-1 coding for multimedia applications

ISO/IEC 11172 sets the bases for coding video sequences under the constraints of keeping the compatibility between distinct platforms, achieving highest compression rate and decoded picture quality. Programmers feel free to rewrite the algorithms in order to improve either compression rate, or quality, or even processing time. So, once fixed both expected compression rate and minimum picture quality, programming optimization can be applied to speed up the code execution. Nevertheless, this is not a highly optimized operation on multithread, multiprocessor systems. When dealing with these platforms, programmers are able to distribute work among several processors by setting up a number of mutually independent threads. This way, code performance is heavily increased. Some methods for accelerating as much as possible the coding process with full compatibility with the standard and no quality loss are discussed. In addition, coding system is part of a major multimedia environment dealing with video sequences stored in a database. Organization of the whole project and communication within it is also discussed.