Building an H.264 Decoder with Nvidia CUDA

Written by hacker84199059 | Published 2025/09/23
Tech Story Tags: cuda | gpu-video-encoding | nvidia | c++ | nvidia-cuda | video-codec-development | parallel-video-processing | fpga-entropy-decoding

TLDRMore than a decade after first experimenting with H.264 encoding, the author revisits the challenge of building a performant video decoder. After weighing options like third-party chips and Intel’s Media SDK, Nvidia CUDA emerged as the most flexible solution. A year of development produced a working H.264 decoder, but entropy decoding revealed CUDA’s limits—pointing to FPGA and even full DVB-S/DVB-S2 decoding with SDR as the next frontier.via the TL;DR App
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Published by HackerNoon on 2025/09/23
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