Patent ID: 8145779

Claim:
A computer program product for causing a computing system to dynamically transcode media content to be presented on a client presentation system, the computer program product comprising: one or more computer-readable physical and/or memory storage media, the one or more computer-readable memory media having stored thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of the computing system, cause the computing system to perform the following: maintaining a transcoding profile library, the transcoding profile library comprising a plurality of transcoding profiles for particular media content; an act of receiving a request for media content to be delivered to a client presentation system, wherein the requested media content has an associated untranscoded version of the requested media and a limited number of base transcoding profiles in the transcoding profile library associated therewith, and each base transcoding profile corresponding to a cached version of the requested media content that was previously transcoded; an act of determining if transcoding parameters are to be applied to the requested media content, if not, delivering the untranscoded version of the requested media content to the client presentation system; if transcoding parameters are to be applied, an act of identifying the transcoding parameters from transcoding information included in the request for media content; determining whether an existing base transcoding profile exists within the transcoding profile library corresponds to the identified transcoding parameters and the requested media content; if an existing base profile exists, delivering a cached version of the requested media corresponding with the existing base transcoding profile and the requested media content to the client presentation system; if an existing base profile does not exist, an act of incrementally transcoding a cached version of the requested media in accordance with the identified transcoding parameters, such that additional incremental transcoding is performed based on multiple of the identified transcoding parameters on top of a base transcoding profile which corresponds to the cached version of the requested media which was previously transcoded according to that respective base transcoding profile; an act of delivering the incrementally transcoded cached version of the requested media content to the client presentation system; adding a new transcoding profile to the transcoding profile library corresponding to the incrementally transcoded cached version of the requested media; and an act of caching the incrementally transcoded cached version of the requested media content.