Patent ID: 8279755

Claim:
A transmission system, comprising one or more transmitter, for use in transmitting a representation of a stream of data, to at least one receiver, in packets over a channel over which packet loss or corruption is possible and the transmission system includes forward error correction (“FEC”) information in the representation, the transmission system comprising: a stream input for receiving source packets comprising source data to be transported, wherein the transmission system is configured to process the source data as stream data in that it is processed without requiring that all of the source data be available prior to beginning transmission; an FEC source packet generator configured to generate FEC source packets that include information representing data from the source packets available from the stream input, formatted to allow for identification of lost or corrupted source packets at the at least one receiver; a symbol generator configured to arrange source data from the source packets into a plurality of source symbols, wherein a first source packet in the source packets is arranged into a first number of source symbols, wherein a second source packet in the source packets is arranged into a second number of source symbols, and wherein the first number of source symbols is different than the second number of source symbols; a repair symbol generator configured to generate a plurality of repair symbols, wherein each repair symbol is related to source symbols of a block of source symbols generated by the symbol generator and the relation is according to a set of predetermined FEC encoding rules; a repair packet generator configured to generate one or more FEC repair packets associated with source blocks based on groups of pluralities of the repair symbols generated by the repair symbol generator; and a packet encoder for encoding the FEC source packets and the FEC repair packets for transmission.