Patent ID: 7735111

Claim:
A method, comprising: frequency locking the audio and video streams from a plurality of programs; using independent encoder/program multiplexers, each having its own clock reference, to separately encode and multiplex each program's audio and video streams into a program stream, each program stream having an independent program clock reference (PCR) and audio and video presentation time stamps (PTS) in the audio and video streams; multiplexing the program streams into a transport stream; and synchronizing the programs' PCR and audio and video PTSs in the transport stream from a declared master PCR while avoiding feedback to any of the encoder/program multiplexers in one of the program streams to merge the programs' PCR and audio and video PTSs into one program having the master PCR against which the PTSs for all the audio and video streams are referenced, wherein the programs' PCR and PTS are synchronized by declaring one program and its PCR to be the master PCR and the remaining programs and their PCRs to be slaves, comparing each slave PCR to an interpolated value of the master PCR to compute an offset, setting the slave PCR to the interpolated value, and adding the offset to each occurrence of the slave's PTS.