Patent ID: 6965730

Claim:
A method for dynamically managing bandwidth requirements for a digital recording system which stores data streams in a storage device, comprising: detecting a situation prior to said digital recording system exceeding said storage device's available bandwidth; prioritizing accesses to said storage device according to a policy to avoid losing data from a data stream that is being written to or being read from said storage device; and wherein said step of detecting a situation comprises the sub-steps of: determining, by a media data management module, whether said digital recording system is close to failing to meet a time deadline for writing a data stream to said storage device or reading a data stream from said storage device; and wherein if said digital recording system is close to failing to meet a time deadline for writing a data stream to said storage device or reading a data stream from said storage device, then reporting this fact to a policy module which implements said policy; wherein said media data management module measures said time deadline for each buffer of data transferred to or from said storage device.