Patent ID: 7391809

Claim:
A method for transcoding input video data encoded at an initial bit rate into output video data encoded at a target bit rate, the input video data and the output video data comprising one or more of an intra frame (I-frame), a predictive frame (P-frame), and a bidirectional frame (B-frame), the method implemented by a processor, the method comprising: accumulating transcoding error associated with transcoding the input video data into the output video data to generate accumulated transcoding error; motion-compensating the accumulated transcoding error to generate motion- compensated accumulated transcoding error; error-compensating the input video data with the motion-compensated accumulated transcoding error to generate error-compensated video data; determining whether the input video data comprises bidirectional frame (B-frame) video data; determining whether utilization of the processor is greater than a predetermined maximum utilization; and if the input video data comprises B-frame video data and the utilization of the processor is greater than the predetermined maximum, applying a B-frame switching module operable to disable the accumulating, motion-compensating, and error-compensating operations from being applied to the B-frame video data, and inserting B-frame bypass data into the output video data, the B-frame bypass data indicating that the B-frame video data is not transcoded.