Power Aware H.264/AVC Video Player on PAC Dual-Core SoC Platform

This paper proposes a novel power-aware scheme of H.264/AVC video player for the PAC SoC platform based on its modern dual-core architecture with DVFS capability. Energy/power is saved by the global view of power state transitions on the dual-core subsystem according to a user’s behaviors of playing a video. When the user stays in continuous video decoding, a fine-grain power-aware scheme is devised to save the energy/power in advance. Especially the fine-grain model is suitable for any standard coded H.264/AVC video without extra modifications. We also discuss a workable reduction technique when imprecise video decoding time is permitted under soft real-time constraint. For a similar SoC platform with the dual-core architecture and DVFS capability, the idea presented here is, to the best of our knowledge, the first power-aware design of H.264/AVC video player.