MULTIPLE-CHANNEL CODEC AND TRANSCODER ENVIRONMENT FOR GATEWAY, MCU, BROADCAST, AND VIDEO STORAGE APPLICATIONS

摘要

An environment for integrating a collection of video and audio processors into a multifunction system ideally suited for a common board in a hosted system. Codec and transcoding functions may be autonomous, operate under external control, be managed by a common chaperoning processor, or operated in combinations of each of these ways. The plurality of reconfigurable media signal processors can cooperatively support a variety of concurrent independent or coordinated tasks so as to provide on-demand network functions such as flexibly reconfigurable A/V transcoding, broadcast, video storage support, video mosaicing, etc., each supporting a variety of analog and digital signal formats. The system can be used for networked video services such as conferencing MCU functions, streaming transcoding record and playback video storage, call recording, conference recording, video answering (greeting playback, message record), and other functions. The architecture permits graceful growth, supporting a larger number of co-executing tasks as software algorithms become more efficient and future reconfigurable processors become more powerful, thus providing important architectural continuity.