Patents by Inventor Ric Conover

Ric Conover has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Method and apparatus for concealing disk soft errors in recorded digital television signals
    Patent number: 6993251
    Abstract: A video data storage system holds MPEG compressed video data on a hard disk drive. A transport decoder receives a bit-stream including the compressed audio and video data formatted as transport packets and that reformats the compressed audio and video data into respective program elementary stream (PES) packets. The system stores the audio and video PES packets onto a disk. The system also includes separate audio and video buffer memories that hold the audio and video PES packets when they are read from the disk drive. An MPEG decoder separately accesses the audio and video data from the respective audio and video buffer memories. The audio buffer memory has an amount of memory sufficient to provide the MPEG decoder with audio data representing ten seconds of decoded audio signal. In one embodiment, when a soft error occurs, the MPEG decoder continues to read and decode data from the audio buffer, but stops reading and decoding data from the video buffer.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 31, 2000
    Date of Patent: January 31, 2006
    Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
    Inventors: Larry Phillips, Ric Conover, Kurt Dustin