Patent ID: 7260722

Claim:
A method for communication between a first device and a second device, comprising: at the first device: generating signature information concerning capabilities and/or attributes of the first device and changing the signature information from time to time according to changes in the capabilities and/or attributes of the first device; inserting said signature information as a digital watermark within a multimedia data stream after application layer processing of the multimedia data stream but prior to network and transport layer processing that applies transport layer headers to the data stream, so as to produce a transmit data stream with the digital watermark comprising the signature information embedded therein but not in the transport layer headers of the data stream so that the digital watermark may be dynamic in continuous communication of the multimedia data stream; and transmitting the transmit data stream to the second device; at the second device: receiving the transmit data stream from the first device; extracting said digital watermark comprising the signature information from the transmit data stream to determine the capabilities and/or attributes of the first device; and configuring capabilities of the second device based on the capabilities and/or attributes of the first device; and processing data stream frames received from the first device based on the capabilities configured for the second device.