General Instrument Corporation

Arris Technology, Inc.

Joseph Mehr

Kun-Pei P Chen

Ajay K Luthra

Mandayam A Narasimhan

Tom Du Breuil

Apparatus and methods for reducing the tune-time delay in a television appliance having a PVR subsystem are provided. A first signal path provides a desired television signal for display without a PVR associated tune-time delay. The first signal path includes a first buffer for buffering the television signal and a decoder for decoding the buffered television signal for display. The second signal path includes a storage device for storing a copy of the buffered television signal, and a second buffer for buffering the stored television signal when a trick play mode is selected. The decoder decodes the buffered television signal to provide the requested trick play mode. A switch is provided under control of the processor for switching between display of the television signal via the first path and display of the trick play mode via the second path.

Methods and apparatus for reducing tune-time delay in a television appliance with personal versatile recorder capabilities

Progressive I-slice refreshed MPEG data streams are transcoded to I-frame based MPEG data streams to enable trick play modes on a television appliance, such as pause, scan forward, scan backward, jump, or still frame displays for use, e.g., in film indexing (chapters). A progressive I-slice refreshed MPEG data streamhaving I-slices distributed over multiple P-frames is received by a television appliance. The P-frames are decoded at decoderto recover the I-slices which make up a complete I-frame. The recovered I-slices are assembled (e.g., by processor) into a complete I-frame. The complete I-frame is encoded at an encoder. A selected P-frame in the MPEG data stream is replaced with the encoded I-frame (e.g., via multiplexer) to provide an encoded I-frame based data stream. The I-frame based data stream is stored (e.g., in memory) for trick play mode use.

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North Wales, PA, United States of America

Joseph Mehr