APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR MPEG VIDEO DECOMPRESSION

A novel apparatus and method is disclosed to decode an encoded MPEG video stream in an efficient manner making optimal use of available system memory and computational resources. The present invention partitions the MPEG video decode task into software tasks which are executed by a CPU and hardware tasks which are implemented in dedicated video hardware. Software tasks represent those tasks which do not require extensive memory or computational resources. On the other hand, tasks implemented in dedicated video hardware represent those tasks which involve computational and memory mintensive operations. Synchronization between software tasks executed by the CPU and hardware tasks implemented in dedicated video hardware is achieved by means of various data structures, control structures and device drivers.