HYBRID SOFTWARE/HARDWARE VIDEO DECODER FOR PERSONAL COMPUTER

A software/hardware hybrid video decoder, particularly suited for decoding MPEG video, that takes advantage of processing capabilities of graphics coprocessors to perform the motion compensation portion of video decoding. Motion compensation is performed by bit block transfer (bit BLT) operations on the graphics coprocessor. The bit BLT operations perform the addition of pixels in the reference and error blocks. Bit BLT operations may also be used for interpolation between reference blocks to provide subpixel resolution for motion vectors.