Patent ID: 8503355

Claim:
A method of managing a walkie-talkie (“push-to-talk”) mode session between a plurality of terminals having respective data coding and decoding capacities, the method comprising: connecting the plurality of terminals in the session via a walkie-talkie mode session management server and at least one telecommunications network; establishing a multimedia session between a first terminal and one or more other terminals of the plurality of terminals through message exchanges based on a signaling protocol; and during the established multimedia session: sending multimedia data coded using an initial coding type from a sender terminal to a plurality of receiver terminals connected via the server, the initial coding type representing a codec used by the sender terminal to code the multimedia data; receiving, at the server, the multimedia data coded using the initial coding type, upon reception of the multimedia data coded according to the initial coding type; checking, at the server and using the received data, the compatibility of the respective capacities of the receiver terminals with the initial coding type of the received coded multimedia data; under the condition that an incompatibility between the initial coding type of the received coded multimedia data and the capacities of any of the receiver terminals is detected by the server, adapting, at the server and for each incompatible receiver terminal, the coding of the received multimedia data from the initial coding type to a coding type compatible with the capacities of said incompatible receiver terminal before forwarding, by the server, the adapted multimedia data to their respective incompatible receiver terminal, so that each incompatible receiver terminal is therefore able to decode the multimedia data; and forwarding, by the server, the received multimedia data coded using the initial code type without adaptation, to any receiver terminal that has capacities compatible with the initial coding type; wherein said adapting comprises, at the server side: extracting, from the received multimedia data, payload data coded using the initial coding type; determining and selecting one coding type that is compatible with the capacities of the receiver terminal; and coding the payload data having the initial coding type into payload data that has the selected coding type, wherein the payload data is coded useful multimedia data of a data packet that is different from a header of the multimedia data packet.