Performance optimization of a multimedia player on a mobile CPU platform

We conducted a mobile platform specific software and system optimization for an open-source multimedia player, MPlayer. The target system is based on the Intel XScale PXA270 CPU. The optimization process consists of 4 steps: utilizing the color conversion hardware, adopting SIMD optimization, increasing the external memory access speed, and exploiting the internal memory. At each optimization step, we measured the execution time, cache miss characteristics, and power consumption. The experimental results with a QVGA-sized MPEG4 movie clip show that hardware based color conversion and SIMD optimization bring about 19.2% and 27.6% of execution time reduction, respectively, while increasing the external memory access speed and utilizing the internal memory result in 35.9% additional execution time reduction. The results show that it is important to break the memory bus bottleneck by using faster data bus settings and exploiting internal SRAM.