Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba

Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.p.

Front Porch Digital, Inc.

Other

Tamiras Per Pte. Ltd., LLC

Murdock Fund 8 Limited Liability Company

Jay Yogeshwar

Stephen A Martucci

Frederick M Venzie

Bobby R Gupta

Hideki Mimura

Hiroaki Unno

Christopher J Cookson

Tetsuya Kitamura

Andrew Drusin Rosen

Mikhail Tsinberg

Toshinori Odaka

Sheau-Bao Ng

Greg B Thagard

Melanie R Fendt

Faramarz Azadegan

Teiichi Ichikawa

David Lehmann

Robert Rozploch

Masaru Sakurai

Melanie R Reeder

Archival storage and retrieval of audio/video information is described. Audio and/or video information is digitized, compressed and stored in an intermediate archive format (IAF), which preserves the content at a high-enough quality for subsequent retrieval and conversion into various formats required at the time of use or distribution. A single capture operation is performed with ancillary metadata being added to facilitate subsequent searching, indexing and format conversion. Captured data content is catalogued and indexed at or subsequent to the creation of an IAF file that includes the archived information. The IAF includes a family of audio-video digital encoding formats based on public standards. The encoding format used in any particular application is determined at encoding time from information provided by the archive system user. At encoding, the particular encoding scheme is selected to optimize a tradeoff between storage constraints and end use quality requirements.

Methods and apparatus for indexing and archiving encoded audio/video data

Methods and apparatus for indexing and archiving encoded audio-video data

Methods and apparatus for archiving, indexing and accessing audio and video data

Methods and apparatus for generating, including and using information relating to archived audio/video data

A compressed video decoder receives a stream of compressed video data in a channel buffer, and decompresses it. A portion of the decompressed video data is recompressed as intraframe data to serve as an anchor frame. The intraframe data is motion compensated, and then a reference picture is selected. The reference frame data is decompressed. Next, a region of interest is selected and stored in display memory for the decompressed form. The recompression of data to be used as an anchor frame can be done in a substantially lossless manner by using DCT with the same quantization matrix, quantizer scale, and field/frame coding type.

Compression based reduced memory video decoder

A method and system in which a section of a previously encoded digital bit stream is replaced with another section of encoded video. In order to remove a section of encoded video, it is necessary to determine the beginning and ending points of the encoded video in the digitally encoded bit stream. The addresses of the beginning and ending points of the encoded data cannot be simply looked up but are calculated by summing the bits consumed by each picture, the number of bits of the sequence header of each picture, the number of bits of each Group of Pictures (GOP) header, and all stuff bits. In order to encode the video which is to be inserted in place of the removed video, a process is performed which prevents decoding artifacts from appearing. This is accomplished by determining the last P-picture before the edit point and using it as a reference frame for frames after the edit point. Additionally, a short period of the original video encoded using its original quantizer values is included at the end of the video to be substituted. Alternatively, the encoder may be run so that an earlier encoded reference picture is not used. However, this requires extra bits to maintain picture quality because initial bidirectional frames of the substitute video will use only one reference frame instead of two.

Method and system to replace sections of an encoded video bitstream

An audiovisual encoding system using a multipass video encoder and a plurality of one-pass audio encoders. The number of audio encoders used by the system is equal to the number of audio tracks to be encoded divided by the number of passes required for the video encoding rounded up to the nearest integer, if necessary. The system allows the video encoder and audio encoders to be used at the same time so that the encoding of the video is completed at the same time as the encoding of all audio tracks is completed, using the minimum number of audio encoders.

Audiovisual encoding system with a reduced number of audio encoders

A method and system in which a user manually changes the quality of portions of video frames after the frames have been previously encoded. Regions of one or more frames of video are selected to have an increased quality, a decreased quality, or a quality which should not be altered. After the regions are defined by a user, the frame of video is digitally re-encoded and inserted into the digitally encoded data stream in place of the previously encoded data. In order to easily remove a previously encoded frame from the data steam and replace it with a newly encoded frame having regions of quality defined by the user, it is preferable to have the newly encoded frame consume the same number of bits as the previously encoded frame. Accordingly, if the user desires a region of a frame to have an increased quality, the extra bits necessary to provide the increased quality must be taken from other areas of the frame. This is accomplished by an automatic process which is transparent to the user. Additionally, if the user wants to change the quality of an object for a series of video frames, the user can mark a region in a first frame and a corresponding region in a last frame and the system will automatically adjust the quality of the region as the region moves through the series of video frames.

Method and system for a user to manually alter the quality of previously

A partition decoder system for high definition video decoding receives an HD picture divided into a selected number of sections, each section including identification data including a start code. An FLD detects each start code and assigns a pointer. A selected number of partition decoders, corresponding to the selected number of sections, uses the pointers to select and decode a selected section of the HD picture. The selection is made according to a selected memory management scheme.

High definition video decoding using multiple partition decoders

A method and system in which a user manually changes the quality of specific time periods of encoded video. After the automatic encoding of video into a compressed digital format, a person editing the encoded video reviews the quality of the video and manually indicates that the quality of specific time periods of the video is to be altered. As the digital storage medium such as an optical disc which stores the encoded video has a finite storage capacity, the total number of bits for the encoded video and the quality of the video is limited. Consequently, in order to increase the quality for one time period, bits must be taken from other time periods. After the editor assigns the qualities to different time periods, a percentage of bits is removed from the time sequences and placed into a bit pool. The new number of bits for the various time periods are calculated using an exponential function and the bits in the bit pool are proportionally distributed to the video frames. The frames must then be checked and possibly adjusted to assure that underflow of the video buffer will not occur. After the underflow checking procedure, the video is re-encoded with an adjusted quantization in accordance with a quantizer model which will result in a picture having the calculated number of bits and a quality in accordance with the user's selection.

Method and system for a user to manually alter the quality of a

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Lawrenceville, NJ, United States of America

Jay Yogeshwar