Motion estimation is a key technique of modern video processing that significantly improves the coding efficiency significantly by exploiting the temporal redundancy between successive frames. Thread-level parallelism is a promising method to accelerate the motion estimation process for multithreading general-purpose processors. In this paper, we propose a parallel motion estimation algorithm which parallelizes the motion search process of the current H.264/AVC encoder. The proposed algorithm is implemented using the OpenMP application programming interface (API) and can be easily integrated into the current encoder. The experimental results show that the proposed parallel algorithm can reduce the processing time of the motion estimation up to 65.08% without any penalty in the rate-distortion (RD) performance.