Decoding scheme for variable block length signals

Abstract

The present invention relates to a two-step decoding approach, where the size of a media block is first calculated or determined based on a subset of information from a bitstream. This size information defines the number of bytes or length of the media block. The size information is then used to chop-off or extract the first media block from the following second media block and rest of the bit-stream. This step requires less computation or processing than the actual decoding step. Normal decoding of the first media block can then proceed, while the processing elements of the parallel architecture can already jump to the second media block using the size information obtained in the first step, without waiting for the end of processing of the first media block. In this way, decoding times get reduced, as the underlying architecture is able to harness the parallelism by decoding multiple blocks at the same time.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.