Patent ID: 6993251

Claim:
A method for storing video and audio data which have been compressed according to a standard specific by the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG), the method comprising the steps of: monitoring the disk for soft errors; formatting the video and audio data into respective program elementary stream (PES) packets; recording the video and audio PES packets on a disk wherein the video PES packets are recorded separately from the audio PES packets; retrieving the video and audio PES packets from the disk; storing the retrieved audio and video PES packets into respective video and audio buffers, wherein the audio PES packets stored in the audio buffer represent a sufficient amount of audio data to be decoded during an interval in which no audio data is being stored into the audio buffer due to a first number of retries caused by at least one soft error on disk and the video PES packets stored in the video buffer represent a sufficient amount of video data to be decoded during an interval in which no video data is being stored into the video buffer due to a second number of retries caused by at least one soft error on the disk; wherein the first number of retries is greater than the second number of retries; and providing the decoded audio and video PES packets from the respective audio and video buffers to an MPEG decoder; when a soft error occurs, causing the MPEG decoder to repeatedly display a current frame; and after the occurrence of the soft error, performing the steps of: determining if the audio and video PES packets being provided to the MPEG decoder are synchronized in time; if the packets are not synchronized, monitoring the data stored into the buffer for encoded images that are not used to decode any other image and discarding video PES packets corresponding to the encoded images that are not used to decode any other image until the audio and video PES packets are synchronized in time.