Patent ID: 8300703

Claim:
An adaptive transcoder, comprising: a shared memory containing a plurality of decoder buffers configured to store a plurality of incoming data packets, a plurality of decoder instances configured to control a decoding process to generate a plurality of image raw data based on the plurality of incoming data packets, and a plurality of encoder instances configured to control an encoding process to generate a plurality of outgoing packets based on the image raw data; and a data processing element containing a plurality of processing cores and a core controller; wherein each of the plurality of decoder instances is paired with one of the plurality of encoder instances, wherein each of the decoder buffers is associated with one of the decoder instances, wherein each respective decoder buffer includes a respective monitoring element for monitoring a status of each the respective decoder buffer, and providing buffer data corresponding to the status of the respective decoder buffer, the buffer data comprises: a warning indicator indicating whether the respective decoder buffer has reached a first threshold of stored packets; an alert indicator indicating whether the respective decoder buffer has reached a second threshold of stored packets, the second threshold being greater than the first threshold; and a critical alert indicator indicating whether the respective decoder buffer has reached a third threshold of stored packets, the third threshold being greater than the second threshold; wherein each of the plurality of the encoder instances are associated with a corresponding one of the plurality of processing cores, and wherein the core controller uses the buffer data to associate each of the plurality of decoder instances with a selected one of the plurality of processing cores.