METHOD OF RECORDING A STREAM OF AUDIO-VISUAL DATA

摘要

When a stream of audio-visual data like a television program is recorded (110) with a digital video recorder comprising a compression engine (113) for compressing the stream prior to storage using a variable bit-rate compression technique, the size of the full stream to be stored is unknown. The invention provides a method which solves this problem by providing information on the complexity of the stream to be stored. With this information, combined with information on the duration of the stream of audio-visual data and the compression algorithm used to compress the stream, the amount of storage space to be reserved for storing the stream of audio-visual data can be determined.