Method and apparatus for mixing video streams at the macro block level

The invention describes a method and an apparatus for mixing video streams in a video mixer device which combines a plurality of input video streams from different participants, which are encoded with code words of macro blocks and in which the code words have interdependencies in an output video stream. Here, the input video streams are at least as far as entropy decoded, that the dependencies between the codewords are dissolved, wherein the macro blocks rearranged and mixed together, and the mixed macroblocks are entropy-encoded into a new dedicated video stream.