Patent ID: 8873636

Claim:
A moving image distribution server, comprising: an acquirer configured to sequentially acquire viewpoint information to determine a screen to be rendered; a renderer configured to render a distribution screen by rendering processing in at least two steps using the viewpoint information acquired by said acquirer, wherein said renderer generates, in rendering processing of a preceding stage, an intermediate value map of a specific channel to be referred to in rendering processing of a subsequent stage, and renders, in the rendering processing of the subsequent stage, the distribution screen by referring to the intermediate value map; a divider configured to acquire an intermediate value map of at least one channel generated for a first screen and divide the intermediate value map into a plurality of blocks during execution of the rendering processing of the subsequent stage for the first screen; a specifier configured to specify, for each of the plurality of blocks, a region corresponding to the block on the intermediate value map of the same channel generated for a second screen rendered before the first screen; a coder configured to generate, after an end of the rendering processing of the subsequent stage for the first screen, coded moving image data by coding the first screen, wherein for a block, out of the plurality of blocks, whose similarity to the corresponding region specified by said specifier is not less than a threshold, said coder performs inter-frame coding between an image of the block of the first screen and an image of the corresponding region of the second screen, and for a block, out of the plurality of blocks, whose similarity to the corresponding region specified by said specifier is less than the threshold, said coder performs intra-frame coding of the image of the block of the first screen; and a sender configured to send data to an external device, wherein said sender sends, for the block whose similarity to the corresponding region is not less than the threshold, the block and specific information to specify the corresponding region for the block to the external device before said coder completes generation of the coded moving image data of each block of the first screen, and sends the coded moving image data to the external device after said coder has completed generation of the coded moving image data of each block of the first screen.