US Patent Issued to TIME WARNER CABLE ENTERPRISES on Aug. 5 for "Apparatus and methods for thumbnail generation" (Maryland, North Carolina Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,382,148, issued on Aug. 5, was assigned to TIME WARNER CABLE ENTERPRISES LLC (St. Louis).

"Apparatus and methods for thumbnail generation" was invented by Glen Hardin (Charlotte, N.C.) and Eric Manchester (Rockville, Md.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Apparatus and methods for thumbnail generation. In one embodiment, a thumbnail stream is generated where one or more bits are assigned to key frames and minimizes the number of bits assigned to delta frames. Each key frame may be used to extract a still image for use in thumbnails during trick mode operation (e.g., fast forward, rewind, pause, or random seek operation). When the encoded vide...