Video transcoder rate control

Abstract

A system and method for transcoding a video bitstream is disclosed herein. A video transcoder in accordance with the present disclosure includes a video decoder, a video encoder, and a rate controller. The video decoder decodes an encoded source video bitstream to produce an image. The video encoder encodes the image to produce a transcoded video bitstream. The rate controller controls the bitrate of the transcoded video bitstream. The rate controller includes a macroblock level controller that provides a transcoder quantization parameter to the encoder. The macroblock level controller derives the transcoder quantization parameter applied to a transcoder macroblock by the encoder, at least in part, from a source quantization parameter of a corresponding macroblock in the source video bitstream.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.