Patent ID: 7023858

Claim:
A method of managing digital video SI (Service information) data when said SI data are not time multiplexed in the same transport stream as its associated video data, comprising: receiving a digital video inband transport stream with video data for each program segregated by Packet Identifiers (PID), so that each program in the digital video inband transport stream is identified by an associated PID; wherein the digital video inband transport stream does not contain SI data associated with and time multiplexed with the digital video data; receiving an out of band Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) packet containing the digital video SI data, the ATM packet having a virtual channel indicator (VCI) in a header thereof associating the type of SI data in the ATM packet with a virtual channel; storing the SI information in a memory associated with the VCI; and retrieving the SI information from the memory associated with the VCI upon request of a system processor.