Patent ID: 8040438

Claim:
A method for a channel change in digital broadcasting, comprising: 1) recognizing a command for a channel change while the currently connected channel is being decoded and played at the digital broadcast terminal; 2) starting the process of video stream concatenation to concatenate a new channel, terminating the currently connected channel, and maintaining the received video stream in case a command for a channel change is given in step 1); 3) receiving and analyzing the data of the new stream for channel concatenation by: 3-1) determining the point where the process of video stream concatenation can end; 3-2) receiving the complete audio AU and removing uncompleted audio AU; 3-3) ending the process of video stream concatenation after step 3-1); 3-4) removing pictures which make invalid references in the newly concatenated stream during or after the process of video stream concatenation is taking place or ended in said step 3-3); 3-5) calculating the time difference between the previous channel and the newly concatenated channel in order to maintain continuity of time by measuring the difference in time information using the following equation: Δ=DTS ( I ) new −DTS ( I ), where DTS (I) new is obtained from the equation DTS ( I ) new =DTS ( v i+1 ) +αDTS ( I ) new is the new DTS of picture I at the beginning of which the process of video stream concatenation ends, DTS (v i+1 ) the DTS of the point where the process of video stream concatenation starts in the former stream, α is the physical time distance between the arrival time of picture (V i+1 ) at the beginning of which the process of video stream concatenation starts and the arrival of picture I at the beginning of which the process of video stream concatenation ends, DTS (I) new is the new DTS of picture I at the beginning of which the process of video stream concatenation ends, DTS (I) is the original DTS of picture I at the beginning of which the process of video stream concatenation ends, Δ is the time difference to be applied to the time information of the newly concatenated stream; and 3-6) analyzing the information of the newly concatenated channel during the process of said step 3; and 4) receiving the newly concatenated channel stream, modifying information of the new stream based on the information obtained in step 3) in order to make the stream continuous with the previous stream.