Patent ID: 7706447

Claim:
A method for transmitting video information, in which at least a first bit-stream and a second bit-stream are formed from the video information, the first bit-stream comprises a first set of frames comprising at least one video frame, and the second bit-stream comprises a second set of frames comprising at least one predictive video frame, at least partly different encoding parameters are used with encoding of the frames of said first bit-stream and said second bit-stream, at least one frame of said first bit-stream is being transmitted, and the transmission is switched over from said first bit-stream to said second bit-stream, wherein in switching the transmission over from said first bit-stream to said second bit-stream, the second bit-stream comprises at least one primary switching frame, a secondary switching frame corresponding to the at least one primary switching frame is transmitted, the secondary switching frame having been encoded using encoding parameters of the corresponding at least one primary switching frame in the second bit-stream and at least one reference frame from the already transmitted at least one frame of said first bit-stream in such a way that when the secondary switching frame is decoded its reconstructed pixel values are identical to those otherwise resultant from transmission of the at least one primary switching frame in the second bit-stream, the transmission is continued to transmit at least one frame subsequent to the primary switching frame from said second bitstream and said secondary switching frame is used in place of the primary switching frame as a reference frame to be used in the reconstruction of said at least one predictive video frame of the second set of video frames.