INTL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONICS AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS, 2021, VOL. 67, NO. 2, PP. 309-314 Manuscript received June 12, 2020; revised April, 2021 DOI: 10.24425/ijet.2021.135981 Abstract—High definition video transmission is one of the prime demands of modern day communication. Changing needs demand diverse features to be offered by the video codec standards, H.264 fits to these requirements for video compression. In this work, an attempt has been made to optimize the inter prediction along with improved intra prediction to ensure the minimal bit rates thereby reduction in the channel bandwidth, which is required in most of the wireless applications. In intraprediction, only DC prediction mode is chosen out of 9 modes with 4*4 luma blocks that reduces the coding complexity towards optimal logic utilization in order to support typical FPGA board for hardware implementation. Most significantly, Inter prediction is carried out utilizing the M9K blocks efficiently with proper timing synchronization to reduce the latency in the encoding operation. Experimental set up comprising of two Altera DE2-115 boards connected through Ethernet cable demonstrated the video transmission. These optimized intra prediction and inter prediction stages resulted in significant improvement in the video compression possessing good subjective quality and increased video compression Keywords—H.264, Intra prediction, Inter prediction, M9K, timing synchronization , QP I. INTRODUCTION echnology always provides services, challenges and solutions. This is very much true with respect to video communications, which has made the information, knowledge and video data transfer simple and beyond the imagination of man. Besides these advantages , it has also provided newer challenges in making optimum use of this technology. Scientific community and engineers have been taking these challenges and providing solutions in ensuring the technological fruits are completely received by the common man. World is experiencing one such technological revolution with the emergence of Internet of things. Today internet and video driven services came to reality due to the evolution of distinct video coding standards and their wide range of features. Streaming video has become the rudimentary feature of modern day communication, especially in broadcasting. This feature has been explored to the maximum with the wide usage by distinct groups in the society. The evolution of coding standardhas been active from last three decades and it has taken a leap with the introduction of H.264 AVC. The digital transmission systems should be good enough to cater the increased demand for quality and speed in video data transmission. This situation has pushed for the search of better methods to be followed , which has led to improvise the The inter prediction of H.264 Video codec mentioned in this paper is a part of the research project going on in Sathyabama University with the grants funded by Combact Vehicle Research Development and Establishement, India during the year 2016. We thank Sathyabama University for providing us with various resources for carrying out this work. Being a co-investigator in this algorithms used in H.264/AVC standard. The goal of this standard is enhanced compression performance and network friendly nature. This standard also brought notable improvement in the rate distortion efficiency. H.264 offers high quality video in 720p or 1080p resolutions, Codec scalability, Interoperability and is familiar to industry as it is possessing adherence to industry standards. The playback efficiency , highest functionality offered by H.264 based ecosystem, content management are some of the additional features.Because of the aforementioned reasons, H.264 Codec has become the dominant video streaming standard. Diverse transport protocols are required to ensure the reliable video reception; H.264 offers a range of transport protocols to ensure the reliability. Few are RTP/RTSP, Transport Stream, HTTP, TCP/RTSP etc. This offers,choices for the architects and improves the adaptability to various systems. H.264 also possess adaptive deblocking filter that reduces the artifacts. It allows storing of several video frames in the memory. It has a prediction mechanism and uses integer transform instead of DCT used by other standards. To increase the interoperability besides containing the complexity, H.264 standard offers specification defined profiles and levels. This made the standard to be used widely and improved the deployment capability of the standard. A profile is a subset of entire bit stream syntax. All decoders compliant to a certain profile, support all the tools in the corresponding profile. A level is a specific set of constraints imposed on values of the syntax elements in the bit stream. This addresses the challenge of using decoder that is able to accommodate all the uses of a syntax in a profile. Baseline Profile, Main Profile and Extended Profile are offered by this standard. Each profile is defined for a specific purpose and in our work the baseline profile is used for simplicity and less delay for the sake of simplicity and compatability with the hardware implementation. II. IMPROVED INTRAPREDICTION H.264 standard supports intra prediction for different sizes i.e. 16x16 macro blocks as a whole or 4x4 sub blocks. There are seventeen prediction modes for a macro block, nine prediction modes for 4x4 luma sub macro blocks, four modes of 8x8 blocks are used for lumamacroblock and four modes of 8x8 blocks for chromamacroblocks. The intra prediction is based on the correlation between the nearby pixels. For a real time image, the nearby pixels vary slightly. Here the basic process is prediction of work, I am grateful to my dean Dr.G.Sundari, the Principal Investigator of this research project for her unconditional support. The Authors are with Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, India, (e-mail: bernatin12@gmail.com, sundariece16@gmail.com, anselinnisha.ece@sathyabama.ac.in, godwin.etc@sathyabama.ac.in). Optimized Inter Prediction for H.264 Video Codec T. Bernatin, G.Sundari, Sahaya Anselin Nisha, and M.S. Godwin Premi T