Patent ID: 7570305

Claim:
A method, comprising: accepting video samples of at least one video signal representing lines of at least one video image, at least one of the video signals including horizontal synchronization pulses at a sync tip level, the video samples formed by blindly sampling the least one video signal in a manner unsynchronized with the video signal or any synchronization signal related to the video signal; storing the accepted video samples in a memory, the memory able to store at least one video line of video samples of each video signal; and analyzing in real time sets of the accepted video samples of the at least one video signal, each set including at least one video line of samples of a video image, the analyzing to determine video characteristics of successive video lines of any image in the at least one video signal to provide information sufficient for decoding the video information in the video samples, the analyzing including determining the horizontal synchronization location in each line of the set of video samples of the at least one video signal which contains a horizontal synchronization pulse at a synch tip level and a back porch region at a black level, the analyzing being at a rate that can keep up with the rate of storing the samples of the at least one video line in the memory, such that the method can decode video in real time.