Offloading of media transcoding for high-quality multimedia services

Abstract

The demand for high-quality multimedia service in handheld devices has increased with the advance of consumer electronics technologies. However, there are inherent performance limits in such mobile devices due to low processing power, requirements for low power consumption, and limited storage capacity. These factors have obviously prevented high-performance multimedia services from being feasible. In addition, most of the mobile devices support distinct multimedia data formats for video and audio codecs, bit rate, and screen size. Therefore, streaming media or receiving data from other users' devices essentially requires additional data translation along with a transcoding operation. However, most of the processors that are used in mobile devices or even in personal media servers cannot provide sufficient processing power for transcoding. To address the problem, this paper proposes an efficient offloading method for media transcoding can be applied in current commercial products. The system is designed on top of Java and provides sufficient transcoding performance for media streaming with low-end processors.