Patent ID: 8885470

Claim:
A method performed by a multimedia encoding device, the method comprising: determining that a plurality of data segments, which are associated with flows of digital multimedia data, do not fit within a bandwidth; and in response to determining that the plurality of data segments do not fit within the bandwidth: selecting a first subset of the plurality of data segments upon which a reduction in size will have a lesser amount of impact on the quality thereof so as to reduce impact of a size reduction of the plurality of data segments on an overall quality, wherein the overall quality is a function of a bit rate associated with each data segment and a priority associated with each data segment; and applying a first size reduction to the selected first subset of the plurality of data segments such that the plurality of data segments fit within the bandwidth, wherein applying comprises assigning a bit rate to each of the selected data segments such that a resultant quality associated with each data segment is proportional to the priority associated with the data segment.