Abstract: Systems and methods for reducing a bit-rate in a multimedia data stream while maintaining high image quality. Two consecutive frames of the multimedia data stream are spatially filtered, temporally filtered, and combined into a pre-processed frame. In one embodiment, the two consecutive frames are consecutive fields of an interlaced data stream that are deinterlaced by the spatial and temporal filtering process. The pre-processed frame is encoded multiple times using different quantization values to produce a plurality of encoded frames. One of the encoded frames is selected based on its image quality and/or size for inclusion in an encoded data stream. In one embodiment, the pre-processed frame undergoes a motion estimation method that performs an integer level search of overlapping locations around a co-located macroblock in a reference frame followed by a sub-pixel level diamond pattern search.

Abstract: A computerized method for encoding and decoding video comprising: dividing a video frame into macro-blocks; Re-size the video frame into a lower resolution (“resized frame”). Divide the resized video frame into macro-blocks Encode the resized frame with video encoder. The video include a set of motion compensation algorithms that are connected to the same motion estimation block. Find the optimal motion compensation algorithm for each macro-block from a set of motion compensation algorithms. The chosen motion estimation algorithm for each macro-block gives the minimal error compared with the reference resized frame. Resizing the output macro-block of the chosen motion compensation algorithm to the original frame size and subtract it from the original macro-block. Encoding the result with a still image encoder. The image encoder can be a jpeg encoder or jpeg2000 encoder, for example.