Patent ID: 8374344

Claim:
A method of coding a multi-media object, the method comprising the steps of: coding the object via a scalable encoder unit to obtain a bit-stream having multiple coded parts, each coded part including a header and a data part, generating quality information via a quality information generating unit which indicates distortion of a remaining non-truncated portion of the object, where the quality information is directly correlated to the truncation of the the bit-stream during decoding in relation to the data parts of the coded parts of the bit-stream, and adding quality information to the bit-stream via at the scalable encoder unit such that the quality information is situated throughout the bit-stream in a manner selected from at least one of the group consisting of: approximately equal distance through the bit-stream and based on a bit-rate/quality curve, wherein the quality of information comprising quality tags represent a distortion measure indicative of a quality of reproduction of the remaining non-truncated portion of the object when the bit-stream is truncated at a point related to a given tag, which point may occur just after or just before a currently encoded data part.