US Patent 10063872 Segment based encoding of video

A distributed video encoding system splits an input video into video segments. The video segments are encoded using multiple video encoding nodes. Prior to the process of splitting the sequence into video segments, the video is analyzed to generate a dependency map. Intelligent segmentation is performed using the dependency map so that each video segment includes all the video frames from which other video frames within that segment have been encoded in the input video. For example, picture headers are inspected to determine the temporal distance of the farthest past and future reference frames used for encoding frames of a video.