The design and implementation of a software decoder for MPEG video bitstreams
is described. The software has been ported to numerous platforms including PC's,
workstation, and mainframe computers. Performance comparisons are given for several
different bitstreams and platforms including a unique metric devised to compare
price/performance across different platforms (percentage of required bit rate
per dollar). We also show that memory bandwidth is the primary limitation in performance
of the decoder, not the computational complexity of the inverse discrete cosine
transform as is commonly thought.