Production of a video stream with synchronized annotations...

Details Production of a video stream with synchronized annotations... Production of a video stream with synchronized annotations...

1999-09-03

2001-05-08

Feild, Joseph H. (Department: 2771)

Data processing: database and file management or data structures

Database design

Data structure types

C707S793000, C345S215000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06230172

ABSTRACT:

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to multimedia communications. More particularly, the present invention relates to the synchronous delivery of annotated multimedia streams over a diverse computer network.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the proliferation of connections to the internet by a rapidly growing number of users, the viability of the internet as a widely accepted medium of communication has increased correspondingly. Bandwidth requirements can vary significantly depending on the type of multimedia data being delivered. For example, a low resolution, low frame rate video telephone call may require only an ISDN connection, while a high resolution video broadcast of a live event to a large group of viewers may require the bandwidth of a T1 connection. Hence, the ability to deliver of multimedia data over the internet is limited by bandwidth capacity and cost of the network connection and also by the computational capability of the server and client computers.
Existing conventional internet applications, such as electronic mailers and web browser, are capable of transferring and presenting textual and graphical information. However, none of these individual internet applications effectively provide synchronous delivery of a combination of diverse multimedia streams in a coherent and integrated manner. This is because executing several independent and unrelated applications to present the diverse combination of multimedia streams on a client computer can result in a hodgepodge of poor quality, incompatible and/or incoherent presentations.
In view of the foregoing, there are desired improved techniques for reliably providing a multimedia stream such as a video and audio stream, together with annotations such as textual and graphical information in an integrated seamless package to client computer(s), while efficiently utilizing the network resources and consuming minimal computational cycles on the client computer(s).
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention provides synchronization scripts and associated annotated multimedia streams for servers and client computers coupled to each other by a diverse computer network which includes local area networks (LANs) and/or wide area networks (WANs) such as the internet. Annotated multimedia streams can include a compressed video stream for display in a video window, an accompanying compressed audio stream and annotations. Synchronization scripts include annotation streams for synchronizing the display of video streams with annotations, e.g., displayable events, such textual/graphical data in the form of HTML pages with Java applets to be displayed in one or more event windows.
In one embodiment, a producer includes a capture module and an author module for capturing video streams and generating annotation streams, respectively. The video and annotation streams are then stored in stream server(s) to be provided to one or more client computer(s) upon request.
The capture module compresses the video stream using a compression format based on a standard H263, generating, for example, a QCIF resolution (
176×l44
) video frames at 10-20 frames per second (fps) which can be encoded and transmitted over a 20 Kbps connection. Alternatively, using the scalable vector quantization (SVQ) compression algorithm of the present invention, dynamically scalable data transmission rates from 10Kbps to several Mbps can support scalable resolutions of 160×120 to 640×480 and frames rates ranging from 1 fps to 30 fps. Other compression techniques can also be used with the present invention.
In this embodiment, annotation streams include annotation frames which provide either pointer(s) to the event(s) of interest or include displayable data embedded within the annotation stream. Accordingly, each annotation frame includes either an event locator or an event data. In addition, each annotation frame includes an event time marker which corresponds to the time stamp(s) of associated video frame(s) within the video stream. Examples of embedded displayable data include ticker tape data embedded within the annotation stream. Examples of event locators to displayable events include URL addresses pointing to HTML web pages. Note that an event time marker need not be identical to a corresponding video time stamp. The client computer is capable of switching to a new displayable event together with a video frame or in between two video frames.
The video/audio streams and annotation streams are stored in stream server(s) for subsequent retrieval by client computer(s) in a coordinated manner, so that the client computer(s) is able to synchronously display the video frame and displayable event(s) in a video window and event window(s), respectively. In one exemplary implementation, annotation streams include a flipper stream for locating HTML pages and a ticker stream which include ticker (tape) data.
These and other advantages of the present invention will become apparent upon reading the following detailed descriptions and studying the various figures of the drawings.


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