Patent ID: 7620073

Claim:
A method for optimizing the bandwidth of a transport stream comprising the steps of: (a) receiving, at a first interface, a transport stream at a predetermined bit rate, said transport stream including variably compressed program data bearing transport packets and one or more null transport packets, each of said null transport packets being inserted into a time slot of said received transport stream to maintain said predetermined bit rate of said transport stream when none of said compressed program data bearing transport packets are available for insertion into said received transport stream at said transport packet time slot, (b) selectively replacing, at a processor, one or more of said null transport packets with another to-be-remultiplexed data bearing transport packet, (c) extracting selected ones of said transport packets of said received transport stream and discarding each non-selected transport packet, each of said null transport packets being discarded, (d) storing said selected transport packets, (e) storing at least one other data bearing transport packet, (f) scheduling each of said stored transport packets for output in an outputted transport stream, and (g) outputting, at a second interface, each of said stored transport packets in a time slot corresponding to said schedule.