Patent ID: 7292602

Claim:
A network device for transmitting compressed video data onto a channel, the network device comprising: a bit rate converter designed or configured to transcode compressed video data from multiple bitstreams to produce multiple transcoded bitstreams; a multiplexer designed or configured to a) schedule packets from the multiple transcoded bitstreams in a first pass of scheduling in a scheduling period; b) determine if bandwidth is available on the channel after the multiple transcoded bitstreams have been scheduled by the multiplexer in the first pass of scheduling, the available bandwidth including a difference between a bandwidth on the channel and a sum of a bandwidth needed for all of the packets from the multiple transcoded bitstreams scheduled in the first pass of scheduling, and if so, allocate additional packets from the multiple transcoded bitstreams in a second pass of scheduling in the scheduling period to use the determined available bandwidth on the channel after the multiple transcoded bitstreams have been scheduled by the multiplexer in the first pass of scheduling; and a network interface designed or configured to output the packets from the multiple transcoded bitstreams onto the channel.