Patent ID: 7827554

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, via an application executable by one or more processors, topology information indicating input/output characteristics of components of a multimedia pipeline comprising two or more end components, including whether a particular component passes data to a single other component or more than one other component; and ascertaining which end components have an overlapping input with that of another of the end components to provide one or more sets of overlapping-input end components and one or more non-overlapping-input end components; allocating, by the one or more processors, multiple threads for the components of the multimedia pipeline based on the topology information, the allocating comprising: allocating a thread to each set of the overlapping-input end components and all components providing a direct or indirect input to any of the overlapping-input end components of that set; and allocating a thread to each of the non-overlapping-input end components and all components providing a direct or indirect input to each of the non-overlapping input end components.