Real-time and bandwidth efficient capture and delivery of live video to multiple destinations

摘要

Disclosed is a method and system to deliver real-time video data over the Internet in a bandwidth efficient manner. A streaming processor receives raw video data from a video source and communicates a compressed version of the video data to a reflector network. The video data is compress by grouping pixels into blocks and comparing blocks of adjacent frames of video data to identify any changes. Only blocks that have been changed are transmitted to the reflector network. In addition, if a block has been changed in a manner to create a previously transmitted block, then only an identification index for the block is transmitted. The actual content of the block can then be recreated by comparing the index to a list of previously received blocks. The reflector network provides the compressed video stream to multiple clients through a series of reflectors. Each client can customize the quality of the video stream received by requesting a full-stream of a sub-stream from the reflector network.