MPEG-2 Transcoding
The digital video standard for DTV/HDTV.
Compression performance for high-end video
Combines co-efficient transform+predictive coding+ motion
estimation.
Extremely computation intensive:
Current state-of-the art in video compression technology requires
custom chipset to obtain real-time performance in MPEG-2 encoding.
Roughly speaking, something close to CIF video (CCIR 4:2:0
CIF=352x240 at 30 frames/second or 352 x288 at 25 frames/second) can
be decoded in software satisfactorily. It requires processing of 69,300
blocks per second.
In comparison, a broadcast quality video (CIR-601 4:2:2: 720x480 at 30
frames/second or 352x576 at 25 frames/second) requires processing of
405,000 blocks per second.
a production or medical quality video  (MPEG-2 HIGH@HIGH-1440
profile=1920x1152x 60 frames/second) will require processing of
5,184,000 blocks per second.
A full logic xcoder is encoder+decoder!