Patent ID: 7843818

Claim:
An intelligent buffering process to reduce lag in a conference video stream after a data forwarding delay, the stream including a plurality of packets defining either a key frame or a delta frame, the process comprising the steps of: providing a plurality of buffers at a conference server, each of the buffers corresponding to a respective attendee destination; receiving a newly arrived packet; for each of the plurality of buffers, determining, at a computer, whether the newly arrived packet is a key frame, wherein the key frame contains data to construct an entire frame image; and if the packet is a key frame: detecting whether a buffer has reached a predetermined limit and discarding all of a number of currently buffered packets in the buffer if the predetermined limit has been reached; and adding the newly arrived packet as the only packet in the buffer; determining that the newly arrived packet is a delta frame; automatically discarding the delta frame when the buffer contents have reached the predetermined limit; forwarding at least one packet from the buffer to reduce the buffer contents below the predetermined limit; and upon forwarding the at least one packet from the buffer to reduce the buffer contents below the predetermined limit, preventing distortion by continuing to discard subsequent consecutively arriving delta frames until a new key frame has been added to the buffer, wherein the new key frame prevents distortion by containing the data to construct an entire frame image, and wherein the delta frames cause the distortion by being encrypted to contain data representing only changes relative to an immediately preceding key frame or delta frame.