Building an H.264 Decoder with Nvidia CUDA

More 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.