DYNAMIC LOAD-BALANCING BETWEEN TWO PROCESSING MEANS FOR REAL-TIME VIDEO ENCODING

A method for use in a real-time video encoder based on two processing means to optimise the use of computing power of the processing means. This is achieved by dynamically load-balancing between two processing means. The load pattern is determined with measures for the progress of motion estimation in one processing means and the idle time in the other. Adaptive adjustment of load balancing is fulfilled via making a decision on whether the DCT/IDCT/Quantization/Dequantization sub-process is skipped for a macroblock. The invention is not constrained to particular motion estimation techniques.