video and symbol information and send it to one or more receive processors 22 the receiver processor 22 functions as a video decompressor if desired the receiver processor 22 can also decompress symbols if they were compressed during transmission or the symbols can be decompressed by a separate symbol processor 23 as shown a stream combiner 24 then combines the symbols with the image stream in accordance with the logic of fig3 discussed below the decompressed multimedia with symbols can be displayed on an output device 25 such as a video display printer speaker etc now referring to fig2 the compression and transmission logic can be seen at block 26 video images in the stream are scanned by an appropriate scanning device 14 any appropriate scanner 14 may be used preferably the images are scanned at a relatively high sampling rate that is sufficient to reduce or eliminate distortion of symbols in the video images a digitized representation of the images with symbols is generated by the scanner 14 if desired not all video frames in a stream need be scanned for example every tenth frame might be scanned until a symbol is detected then every succeeding frame can be scanned for the symbol when a frame is encountered having no symbols the scanning frequency can revert to every n th frame in this way scanning speed is increased proceeding to block 28 symbols in the image are recognized by character recognition software executed on the transmit processor 16 or if desired the symbol processor 17 any appropriate character recognition algorithms can be used the transmit processor 16 or symbol processor 17 generates symbol information i e binary representations of the symbols that indicate not only the identification type of symbol scanned but also preferably the position of the.