Patent ID: 6859495

Claim:
An apparatus for down-converting a digital video signal, comprising: receiving means for receiving an encoded digital video signal, said encoded digital video signal having been previously generated by converting spatial video data into the DCT domain, quantizing DCT domain coefficients, and variable length encoding the quantized DCT domain coefficients; a variable length decoder for generating variable length decoded DCT data from said received encoded digital video signal; a dequantizer for dequantizing the variable length decoded DCT coefficients generated by said variable length decoder to generate at least first and second DCT blocks, said first and second DCT blocks each having first dimensions; converting means for receiving said at least first and second DCT blocks, and for converting said first and second DCT blocks into a single DCT block having dimensions equal to said first dimensions; a quantizer for re-quantizing the output of said converting means, the quantization scale used by said quantizer for re-quantizing being different than the quantization scale used to generate said encoded digital video signal; and a variable length coder variable length coding output of said quantizer.