Fast video transcoding architectures for networked multimedia applications

In various networked multimedia applications, it is often necessary to change the bit-rate and format of a pre-encoded bit-stream. This can be achieved using a cascaded pixel-domain transcoder, which fully decodes an incoming bit-stream and then re-encodes the decoded pictures with the desired bit-rate or format. However, the cascaded pixel-domain transcoder is computationally expensive. To reduce the computations, several fast architectures have been proposed in the literature. However, these fast transcoder architectures introduce new limitations and are not drift-free. In this paper, we propose new techniques to implement a fast cascaded pixel-domain transcoder. We further discuss the limitation and speed of the different transcoder architectures. We also discuss the methods for adding watermark or company logo, using the different transcoder architectures.