Patent ID: 7672371

Claim:
A method of controlling a plurality of transcoding channels, a transcoding channel allowing an input compressed data signal encoded at an input bit rate to be converted into an output compressed data signal encoded at an output bit rate wherein a regulation process uses quantization scales and the input compressed data signal to determine a video encoding complexity, said method comprising: computing, by a multiplexing device, a weighting factor of a compressed data quality for the respective transcoding channels, the weighting factor being computed for a current picture of the input compressed data signal as an average, over a set of preceding encoded pictures, of a function of an average quantization scale over a preceding picture and a number of bits used to encode the same preceding picture; determining, by the multiplexing device, an indicator as function of the video encoding complexity and associated weighting factor; and allocating, by the multiplexing device, the output bit rate to the transcoding channel from a total output bit rate, its corresponding indicator and a sum of the indicators of the transcoding channels.