Patent ID: 7200855

Claim:
A method of multiplexing a plurality of channels in a multimedia system, the method comprises: receiving a plurality of channels from a multimedia source; receiving a plurality of channel selection commands by: receiving, from a plurality of clients, a plurality of channel selection requests; and processing the plurality of channel selection requests to produce the plurality of channel selection commands, wherein the each of the plurality of channel selection commands includes at least one of: last channel selection command, next channel selection command, previous channel selection command, favorite channel selection command, and select channel from user define list; wherein the receiving the plurality of channel selection commands further includes monitoring a shared bus at specific time intervals, identifying a data frame at one of the specific time intervals that contains at least a portion of one or the plurality of channel selection commands, and decoding, based on a data conveyance protocol of the multimedia system, the data frame to recapture the at least a portion of the one of the plurality of channel selection commands; selecting a channel of the plurality of channels per channel selection command of the plurality of channel selection commands to produce selected channels; and encoding each of the selected channels based on the data conveyance protocol of the multimedia system to produce a set of encoded channel data.