Vudu, Inc.

Sumankar Shankar

Prasanna Ganesan

Andrew Martin Goodman

Edin Hodzic

Prasana Ganesan

Ananth Rao

The techniques related to providing a live program over the Internet are described. According to one aspect of the techniques, a data stream representing a live program is preprocessed to produce a plurality of substreams, each of the substreams comprising decimated samples of the data stream. The number of substreams is relatively large so that the bandwidth requirement for delivering one of the substreams is relatively low. With a group of seeding boxes receiving the substreams, a group of boxes in services are designated to receive the substreams from the seeding boxes, each of these boxes including the seeding boxes is able to support multiple outbound streams (e.g., greater than 2) so that there are enough data suppliers to service the ordering boxes or colonize more boxes to become the data suppliers. As a result, a live program can be timely serviced by peer boxes, significantly reducing the computation and bandwidth burdens on a server(s).

Live video broadcasting on distributed networks

A method performed by one or more processors for segmenting and encoding media content over a network. The media content is first partitioned into an ordered sequence of media segments. Each of the media segments is then encoded (i) at a first bit rate to generate a respective one of a first set of data segments, and (ii) at a second bit rate to generate a respective one of a second set of data segments, wherein data segments of the first set may be used interchangeably with data segments of the second set to facilitate continuous playback of the media content. A request for the media content is then received from another device in the network. In response, a respective one of the first set of data segments or the second set of data segments is selectively transmitted, for each of the media segments, based at least in part on a network bandwidth of the first device.

Multiple bit rate encoding by segments

A system and method for providing multiple audio streams for a video over a network such as the Internet. The system comprises a server that includes an encryption unit and a slicing unit, a plurality of boxes, and an ordering box. The server encodes multiple audio streams and a single video to be sliced into segments. The sliced segments of multiple audio streams and the single video are seeded to a number of the plurality of boxes. This may be repeated for other videos with multiple streams. When the ordering box makes a request for a single video with a single audio, then the number of boxes with segments of the requested video and multiple audio streams, filters and sends the requested video and requested single audio stream to the ordering box. Similarly, multiple closed caption streams can be handled and provided like the audio streams.

Multiple audio streams

A system, machine-readable medium and method for processing video comprising a video segmentor configured to receive a source video and to split the source video into segments; a bit rate allocator configured to receive the segments and generate target bit rates corresponding to the segments; a first encoder coupled to receive the plurality of segments and the target bit rates and configured to encode each of the segments using one of the target bit rates to generate encoded segments; and an output generator configured to receive the encoded segments and generate an encoded video.

Variable bit rate encoding

Techniques for minimizing blocking artifacts in video images or frames are disclosed. In general, these blocking artifacts are the result of block-based compression standards, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.261, H.263, and H.264. According to one aspect of the present invention, a blurring process is configured to replace pixels on the blocking boundaries with randomly selected pixels within respective regions, each of the regions is predefined with respect to a pixel being replaced. In a certain perspective, a blocking boundary is diffused without introducing blurring to other than the blocking artifacts. According to another aspect to the present invention, pixels in an image or frame are sequentially processed by a moving average process that is configured to smooth only those pixels that may cause subjective perception of the blocking artifacts.

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Alwarpet, India

Sumankar Shankar