Patent ID: 7406123

Claim:
A method for playing frames of a video adaptively, comprising the steps of: measuring a spatial frequency of pixel within frames of the video, wherein the spatial frequency is measured from discrete cosine transform coefficients of the pixels in the frames, and wherein basis functions of the discrete cosine transformation are in a form cos ⁡ ( π ⁢ ⁢ k x ⁡ ( 2 ⁢ x + 1 ) 2 ⁢ N ) · cos ⁡ ( π ⁢ ⁢ k y ⁡ ( 2 ⁢ y + 1 ) 2 ⁢ N ) = cos ⁡ ( 2 ⁢ π ⁢ ⁢ k x 2 ⁢ N ⁢ x + 2 ⁢ π ⁢ ⁢ k 4 ⁢ N ) · cos ⁡ ( 2 ⁢ π ⁢ ⁢ k y 2 ⁢ N ⁢ y + 2 ⁢ π ⁢ ⁢ k 4 ⁢ N ) , where k x is a frequency f x in an x direction and k y is a frequency f y in a y direction in the frame represented as cos ⁡ ( 2 ⁢ π ⁢ ⁢ f x N ⁢ x + 2 ⁢ π ⁢ ⁢ f y N ⁢ y ) , where N is 8 for DCT macro-blocks, and each DCT basis is a superimposition of two two dimensional sinusoids; measuring a temporal velocity of corresponding pixels between frames of the video, wherein the temporal velocity is measured from motion vectors of corresponding pixels between the frames; multiplying the spatial frequency by the temporal velocity to obtain a measure of visual complexity of the frames of the video; and playing the frames of the video at a frame rate that corresponds to the measure of visual complexity.