Patent ID: 6950467

Claim:
A method of streaming video data, comprising: providing a plurality of frames to be transmitted from a video transmitter system to a video receiver system; categorizing the plurality of frames into at least one reference frame and at least first and second prediction frames, the reference frame and the first prediction frame are encoded for transmission to the video receiver system, the reference frame being encoded using a zero run coding method; transmitting the encoded reference frame to the video receiver system; dividing the second prediction frame into a plurality of blocks; determining whether any of the plurality of blocks needs to be transmitted to reproduce the second prediction frame of acceptable quality at the video receiver system, wherein the determining step includes comparing a block of the second prediction frame with a corresponding block of a comparison frame that has been previously encoded for transmission to the video receiver system, the comparing step including obtaining a difference value D between a first value representing the block of the second prediction frame and a second value representing the corresponding block of the comparison frame; and transmitting to the video receiver system the blocks that have been determined necessary to reproduce the first prediction frame of acceptable quality at the video receiver system; dividing the block of the second prediction frame into a first set of sub-blocks; obtaining a first set of representative values of the first set of sub-blocks; dividing the corresponding block of the comparison frame into a second set of sub-blocks; and obtaining a second set of representative values for the second set of sub-blocks, wherein the difference value D is obtained by subtracting one of the set of the representative values from the other set of the representative values.