Systems and methods for encoding a video stream based upon identified regions of interest (ROI's) are disclosed herein. Standard video encoding schemes require a significant amount of unnecessary data in order to designate blocks to be skipped for a particular video frame of a video stream. Rather than encoding such skip or no skip information for each block (or sequence of blocks) for each frame, embodiments disclosed herein can encode the video stream based upon an identified ROI that represents an area of blocks that change and/or do not remain static from one frame to the next. Designating active areas in terms of the ROI can yield more efficient encoding.