The emerging coding standard H.264 is mainly intended for video transmission in many areas. Considering the peculiarity of High-Definition TV (HDTV) encoding, the fast development of parallel technology and high-speed DSPs, the efficient hardware architectures were researched for the algorithm of H.264 encoding. After analyzing the experiment results from different platforms, we discussed the application method and the principle of picture splitting as parallel granularity. The parallel system structure based on multi-DSPs, which has many promising characteristics such as powerful computing capability, broad I/O bandwidth, topology flexibility, and expansibility, adopted frame-level load grain, was designed.