Patent ID: 7075990

Claim:
A method comprising: providing a variable bit rate (VBR) representation of an image sequence, the VBR representation comprising a plurality of packets of blocks of information; segmenting the VBR representation based on a plurality of time intervals; for each of at least two of the time intervals: determining which of the packets, denoted by Pp, in the VBR representation within a presently-considered time interval has a number of blocks of information per unit time greater than a baseline value; determining which of the packets, denoted by Pn, in the VBR representation within the presently-considered time interval has a number of blocks of information per unit time less than the baseline value; and creating a second representation of the image sequence in which some blocks of information Bp are removed from at least one Pp packet and interlaced with blocks of information in at least one Pn packet to produce reformatted packets having a reduced variation in a number of blocks of information per unit time.