Seamless splicing of encoded mpeg video and audio

Abstract

Predictive analysis is performed upon encoded digital motion video (such as an MPEG Transport Stream) to facilitate real-time splicing. The predictive analysis includes estimation of upper and lower bounds of the data levels in a decoder's video and audio buffers for splicing in such a way as to prevent buffer overflow and underflow. This enables buffer management techniques including padding or stuffing, micro-restamping, freeze or repeat of frames, skip or drop of frames, alignment of audio with video. The predictive analysis also includes analysis of the structure of the encoded audio including audio access units (AAUs) and compression windows (AFs), prediction in the compressed domain of initial conditions of the decoder buffer levels for every single Elementary Stream (ES) component of a Transport Stream (TS), and identification of valid splicing In Points and Out Points based on the predicted buffer levels without any special encoder. This permits splicing of different compressed audio types without consideration of the details of the compression mechanism. The predictive analysis may also include recommendations or marking. The analysis is performed on ingest of the data as a pre-processing in preparation for splicing of a new file on early queuing in a data storage system before streaming.