By tapering the diameter of a flanged barrel laser rod over its length, the maximum trapped path length of a barrel mode can be dramatically reduced, thereby reducing the ability of the trapped spontaneous emission to negatively impact laser performance through amplified spontaneous emission. One apparatus includes a logic module and a processor. By staggering or phasing the starts of the RMW cycles in a wraparound fashion, each histogram bin is spread out over multiple banks, but testing can proceed faster than if only a single bank was used. The same background information and informational video is composited with a different program guide graphic to form another video sequence that is also encoded.