Int J Parallel Prog DOI 10.1007/s10766-013-0267-4 Performance Optimization of Video Coding Process on Multi-Core Platform Using Gop Level Parallelism S. Sankaraiah · Lam Hai Shuan · C. Eswaran · Junaidi Abdullah Received: 30 March 2013 / Accepted: 13 August 2013 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract High definition video applications often require heavy computation, high bandwidth and high memory requirements which make their real-time implemen- tation difficult. Multi-core architecture with parallelism provides new solutions to implementing complex multimedia applications in real-time. It is well-known that the speed of the H.264 encoder can be increased on a multi-core architecture using the parallelism concept. Most of the parallelization methods proposed earlier for these purposes suffer from the drawbacks of limited scalability and data dependency. In this paper, we present a result obtained using data-level parallelism at the Group-Of- Pictures (GOP) level for the video encoder. The proposed technique involves each GOP being encoded independently and implemented on JM 18.0 using advanced data structures and OpenMP programming techniques. The performance of the par- allelized video encoder is evaluated for various resolutions based on the parameters such as encoding speed, bit rate, memory requirements and PSNR. The results show that with GOP level parallelism, very high speed up values can be achieved without much degradation in the video quality. Keywords Video encoding · H.264 · Data level parallelism · GOP · Speed up · OpenMP · Barrier · Multi-core architecture · Scalability · Load balancing S. Sankaraiah (B )· L. H. Shuan · C. Eswaran · J. Abdullah Center for Visual Computing, Multimedia University, 63100 Cyberjaya, Selangor, Malaysia e-mail: sankar2510@ieee.org; sreemula.sankaraia10@student.mmu.edu.my L. H. Shuan e-mail: hslam@mmu.edu.my C. Eswaran e-mail: eswaran@mmu.edu.my J. Abdullah e-mail: junaidi@mmu.edu.my 123