H.264/AVC is the latest video coding standard from ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). Due to its high compression efficiency and superior video quality, H.264/AVC is becoming the most preferred and common video codec in digital security surveillance (DSS) applications, despite increasing encoding complexity.

Intel® Atom^™ processors are low-power CPUs with Intel® Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extension (SSSE3) instruction sets and Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology, making the product line ideal for cost-effective, embedded DSS applications.

Intel® Core™2 Quad processors feature four complete execution cores with the latest Intel® SSE4 instruction support, delivering exceptional performance in multi-threaded, multi-channel DSS applications.

This paper shows how H.264 encoding performance increases using processor-specific Intel® Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extension (SSSE3) and SSE4 instructions. To maximize performance of DSS applications, the latest Intel® SSSE3 and SSE4 instructions should be used to enhance video encoding, which can result in performance gains of up to 10 percent for the H.264 encoder. In addition, the multi-threaded H.264 encoder outperforms single-threaded encoders by a factor of 2.7x on the Intel Atom processor 330 and by a factor of 3.5x on the Intel Core 2 Quad processor Q9400.