METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ENCODING AND FOR DECODING A MAIN VIDEO SIGNAL AND ONE OR MORE AUXILIARY VIDEO SIGNALS

摘要

Normally, digital PIP video signals are directly edited into the main video signal and then encoded jointly into a single coded video stream. However, in order to give a user full control over the PIP presentation of the encoded video signals, each PIP signal requires a separate encoding, and in a receiver one video decoder is required for each video stream displayed. According to the invention, a PIP-like presentation of timeline-related auxiliary video signals is enabled, achieving this with only one coded video stream and therefore a single video decoder. When encoding, the video plane is logically split into a main video area and a side panel area that carries one or more PIP windows. After decoding, the main video area is displayed centred or stretched to the full display size. The content of the side panel is not displayed directly but, depending on side information, some portions of that side panel are overlaid on the main video window. Because the PIP video signals are no longer hard-coded into the main video window, the user has control over showing or hiding each one of the PIP video signals.