Systems and methods for load balancing audio/video streams

A method for decoding an audio/video stream comprising:

• receiving a video frame of a video stream;
• determining that the video frame will not be decoded before a render time for the video frame;
• rendering a previous video frame at the render time to obtain additional decode time;
• and
• expanding an audio stream associated with the video stream temporally wherein an amount of temporal expansion corresponds to the additional decode time.

A system comprising:

• a display configured to display a decoded video stream of an encoded audio/video stream;
• speaker circuitry configured to play a decoded audio stream of the encoded audio/video stream;
• and
• a decoder subsystem configured to decode the audio/video stream, wherein the decoder subsystem is configured to:
• determine that a video frame of the video stream is not decoded at a render time;
• render a previous video frame of the video stream at the render time;
• and
• temporally expand the audio stream to accommodate the rendering of the previous video frame.

A system comprising:

• a video decoder;
• a video frame duplicator operatively connected to the video decoder;
• a video rendering component operatively connected to the video frame duplicator;
• an audio decoder;
• an audio dilator operatively connected to the audio decoder;
• an audio rendering component operatively connected to the audio dilator;
• and
• a synchronizer operatively connected to the audio rendering component, the audio dilator, the video frame duplicator, and the video rendering component,
• wherein the synchronizer is configured to
• receive a signal from the audio rendering component to render a video frame;
• determine that the video frame is not decoded;
• signal the video frame duplicator to duplicate a previous video frame, wherein the duplicated previous video frame is rendered at a render time of the video frame;
• and
• signal the audio dilator to temporally expand a portion of an audio stream corresponding to a video stream comprising the video frame.

A method, comprising:

• transcoding an encoded audio/visual stream to be decoded at a target device;
• estimating, as part of the transcoding, a time required for decoding a video frame at the target device;
• and
• if the estimated time exceeds an estimated time available on the target device for decoding the video frame,
• adding duplicate predicted frames to a video stream comprising the video frame before the video frame;
• and
• adding audio frames to an audio stream corresponding to the video stream, wherein the time required to decode and render the added audio frames is equivalent to the time required to decode and render the duplicate predicted frames.