Patent ID: 8731048

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving, by a system comprising a processing device, a sequence of image frames including at least one reference frame of the sequence of image frames; and encoding the sequence of image frames including adaptively changing a search range for searching the at least one reference frame based at least upon a reference frame buffer utilization index associated with a reference frame buffer configured for storage of a plurality of image frames, wherein the reference frame buffer utilization index is determined by dividing a total number of pixels that are stored in the reference frame buffer and are referenced by at least one predicted image frame of the sequence of image frames that has been predicted by the encoding at a time the adaptively changing the search range is initiated by a multiplication of a value for the search range, with a number of pixels in an image frame currently being predicted of the sequence of image frames, wherein the total number of pixels and the number of pixels are represented in terms of a unit of measurement.