Patent ID: 7177356

Claim:
In a system where an incoming video stream has a bit rate, a method for transcoding the incoming video stream to reduce the bit rate of the video stream, the method comprising: decoding an incoming video stream that includes at least one B frame and a plurality of macroblocks, each macroblock having parameters that include at least a type flag indicating whether the macroblock is intra or non-intra and, for each non-intra macroblock, one or more motion vectors, wherein the parameters of the incoming video stream are extracted from the incoming video stream and used in generating a new video stream; spatially reducing a size of images of the incoming video stream horizontally and vertically by a selected factor, and such that the at least one B frame is considered during the spatially reducing images; mapping each of the plurality of macroblocks to at least one macroblock in the new video stream; determining a macroblock type for each macroblock of the new video stream, wherein the macroblock type is determined by applying a weighted mean rounded value determined from the type flags of only the macroblocks of the incoming video stream that map to a particular macroblock of the new video stream; and generating the new video stream that includes spatially reduced images using one or more of the parameters extracted from the incoming video stream, and at least the macroblock type of macroblocks of the new video stream, wherein at least one of the parameters corresponds to the at least one B frame, wherein less than all of the parameters of the incoming video stream are re-computed for the new video stream, and wherein the spatially reduced images in the new video stream include at least one B frame.