Patent ID: 6865616
Filing Date: 2005-03-08
Classification: H04B

Abstract:
1. A method for processing a transport stream, the method comprising: (a) parsing the transport stream to derive multiple elementary substreams, each elementary substream including a received media access control (MAC) address; and (b) comparing in hardware the received MAC address of a particular elementary substream against a plurality of stored MAC addresses, each stored MAC address having (i) a concatenated disable bit, and (ii) at least one independent compare mask assigned to it that masks a portion of the MAC address bits from the comparison when the disable bit is inactivated; (c) comparing any unmasked bits of the received MAC address against corresponding unmasked bits of the comparison MAC address; (d) comparing the disable bit with each of the bits in the compare mask to determine if the mask has been disabled for the remaining bits of the MAC addresses; (e) comparing the remaining bits of the received MAC address with the corresponding bits of the comparison MAC address when the mask has been disabled; and (f) repeating steps (c)-(e) for each of the received MAC addresses until a match is achieved between each received MAC address and a particular comparison MAC address.