Low-complexity video content adaptation for legacy user equipment

This paper deals with the adaptation problem raised by the fact that H.264/AVC standard is rapidly being adopted by content and service providers while at the user side MPEG-2 equipment will last much longer. A transcoding scheme is proposed for adapting compressed video content to legacy user equipment in the near-future technology transition period. The proposed transcoder is shown to be computationally efficient and exhibits good performance when compared with single step encoding at the same output format. Possible applications include additional video content adaptation modules with transcoding functionality in either home gateways or adaptation devices, in wireless content distribution scenarios where H.264/AVC is preferred because of its higher efficiency.