Digital high definition television video recorder with trick-play features

Apparatus which processes signals representing video image information to produce a signal to be recorded on a tape by a digital video tape recorder (VTR), whereby the image may be displayed from the recorded signal when the VTR is operating in a trick-play mode, said apparatus comprising:

• means for providing a first data stream representing a relatively high resolution video image which has been encoded using motion compensated encoding techniques;
• data compression means for compressing the first data stream to generate a segmented second data stream representing a relatively low resolution version of said high resolution image, wherein the first data stream is independent of the second data stream for reproducing the image, the second data stream is independent of the first data stream for reproducing the image, and each segment of the second data stream may be expanded independently of any other segment wherein the data compression means includes:
• means for partially decoding the first data stream by decoding relatively low-resolution components of the high resolution video image to the substantial exclusion of high-resolution components thereof;
• and
• means for digitally encoding the partially decoded first data stream to generate the second data stream;
• means for segmenting the first data stream to produce a first set of data segments representing the high resolution image;
• and
• means for interleaving respective data segments representing the first and second data streams to generate the signal to be recorded by the VTR, whereby image data recorded in the low resolution data segments is displayed in trick-play mode.

Apparatus which processes signals representing video image information to produce a signal to be recorded on a tape by a digital video tape recorder (VTR), wherein the video signals include spatially redundant portions and temporally redundant portions, whereby the image may be displayed from the recorded signal when the VTR is operating in a trick-play mode, said apparatus comprising:

• means for providing a first data stream representing a relatively high resolution video image which has been encoded using motion compensated encoding techniques, wherein the first data stream includes video data which has been digitally encoded to provide a reduction in the portion of the data stream used to represent both spatially redundant components and temporally redundant components of the high resolution video image;
• data compression means for compressing the first data stream to generate a segmented second data stream representing a relatively low resolution version of said high resolution image, wherein said first data stream is independent of the second data stream for reproducing the image and each segment of the second data stream may be expanded independently of any other segment;
• wherein the data compression means includes, means for processing the encoded video signal to generate, as the second data stream, a further digitally encoded signal representing the lower resolution version of the high resolution video image by reducing the spatially redundant portion of the low resolution video signal without significantly reducing the temporally redundant portion of the low resolution video signal;
• means for segmenting the first data stream to produce a first set of data segments representing the high resolution image;
• and
• means for interleaving respective data segments representing the first and second data streams to generate the signal to be recorded by the VTR, whereby image data recorded in the low resolution data segments is displayed in trick-play mode.

Apparatus which processes signals representing video image information to produce a signal to be recorded on a tape by a digital video tape recorder (VTR), whereby the image may be displayed from the recorded signal when the VTR is operating in a trick-play mode, said apparatus comprising:

• means for providing a first data stream representing a relatively high resolution video image;
• filtering means for processing the first data stream to attenuate components of the first data stream, which represent parts of the high resolution video image having relatively high spatial frequencies, relative to other components of the first data stream, which represent parts of the high resolution video image having relatively low spatial frequency components, to produce a second data stream representing a relatively low resolution version of the high resolution video image, wherein the first data stream is independent of the second data stream for reproducing the image;
• first data compression means, including motion compensated encoding means, for processing the first data stream to generate a compressed first data stream representing the high resolution video image;
• second data compression means for processing the second data stream using only intraframe encoding techniques to generate a compressed second data stream representing the relatively low resolution video image;
• means for segmenting the compressed first data stream to produce a first set of data segments representing the high resolution image;
• means for segmenting the compressed second data stream to produce a second set of data segments representing the relatively low resolution image;
• and
• means for interleaving respective data segments in the first and second sets to generate the signal to be recorded by the VTR, whereby the recorded low resolution data segments are displayed in trick-play mode.