Patent ID: 8270487

Claim:
A computer server comprising: a plurality of special-purpose hardware transcoder integrated circuits, each configured to transcode video streams; and at least one central processing unit connected to the plurality of transcoder integrated circuits and configured to execute a set of instructions to configure at least one of the hardware transcoder integrated circuits to perform a pre-compositing preparation by transcoding a plurality of independent input video streams to generate corresponding transcoded video streams, wherein at least one of the input independent video streams includes slices encoding more than one row of video blocks, and wherein transcoding the plurality of independent input video streams comprises downscaling each of the independent video streams, enforcing a common group-of-picture (GOP) structure across the transcoded video streams, and enforcing a one-slice-per-row slice structure for each picture of the transcoded video streams; in response to receiving a user video search query from a client computer system, identifying a plurality of transcoded video streams responsive to the user video search query; composite in the transform domain the plurality of transcoded video streams responsive to the user video search query into a composite intermediate video stream encoding a preview video panel array for the identified plurality of transcoded video streams, wherein a GOP structure of the composite intermediate video stream substantially coincides with the common GOP structure of the identified plurality of transcoded video streams; configure at least one of the plurality of transcoder integrated circuits to transcode the composite intermediate video stream to generate an output video stream encoding the preview video panel array; encapsulate the output video stream in a container to generate an encapsulated output video stream; and send a response to the user video search query to the client computer system, wherein the response to the user video search query includes the encapsulated output video stream.