TY - CONF T1 - An MPEG-2 to H. 263 transcoder T2 - SPIE Voice, Video, and Data Communications Conference Y1 - 1999 A1 - Feamster, Nick A1 - Wee,S. AB - We present an MPEG-2 to H.263 transcoder that accepts an interlaced MPEG-2 bitstream as the input and producesa lower-bitrate progressive H.263 bitstream as the output. As both DVD and digital television may use MPEG-2 interlaced sequences, a potential application of such a transcoder is the transmission of a digital television signal over a wireless medium. Another application is transcoding interlaced DVD content for use on lower-resolution thin clients with progressive displays. The proposed algorithm exploits the properties of the MPEG-2 and H.263 compression standards to perform interlaced to progressive ( eld to frame) conversion with spatial downsampling and frame-rate reduction in a CPU and memory e cient manner, while additionally minimizing picture quality degradation as measured by PSNR. This is the rst algorithm to our knowledge that e ectively uses both spatial and temporal downsampling in an MPEG-2 to H.263 eld to frame transcoder in order to achieve substantial bitrate reduction. This paper discusses recoding experiments used to determine appropriate source and target coding parameters for the transcoder, provides a detailed description of the transcoding algorithm, and describes the performance of a software implementation of the transcoder. JA - SPIE Voice, Video, and Data Communications Conference ER -