Communication has become an important part of our life. Innovations in technology have given a way to commercial use of real-time audiovisual communication applications, which require high bandwidth and have real-time characteristics. Without video compression, it is not possible to meet requirements of widely used visual services such as, Video Conferencing, Videophone, Video E-mail, and Video Streaming over Internet, High Definition TV (HDTV), and Digital Video Disc (DVD) due to large bandwidth needs [1]. For this reason, there has been great effort to develop new video compression methods.

Up to this time, several video compression standards were developed. ITU-T standards H.261 [2], H.263 [3] and ISO/IEC standards MPEG-1 [4], MPEG-2 [5] are examples to these standards. Brief descriptions of these standards are given in the following chapters. Joint Video Team (JVT) [6], which is a committee formed by both ITU-T and MPEG members, have released H.264 Recommendation [7], which uses latest innovations in video compression technology, supporting wide range of frame sizes, aiming all bit-rate applications.

Real-time implementation of video compression standards mentioned above requires high processing power due to complexity of the video processing \

operations. It may not be possible to meet real-time requirements of these standards on a desktop PC with commercial operating system. Video processing dedicated kernel and hardware may be required to fulfill real-time timing constraints. If portability is needed, Digital Signal Processors (DSP’s) are considered as an alternative to commercial processors due to their low power consumption and signal processing optimized hardware. Comparing with its predecessors, in order to meet increased computational complexity requirements and real-time timing constraints of H.264 Recommendation, Texas Instruments TMS320C64x [8] Family DSP’s, which is a processor family under TMSC6000 Platform, have been selected among different DSP alternatives. Texas Instruments TMS320C64x DSP Family is designed to meet real-time performance requirements of imaging and video applications for both fixed and portable devices. TMS320C64x Family DSP’ s have come in front with their high processing capability, large internal memory, and large external memory support and low power consumption [6]. As a result, TMS320C64x Family DSP’s are chosen for real-time implementation of H.264 Encoder.