Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput – Remote data accessing – Accessing a remote server
Reexamination Certificate
1997-03-14
2001-01-09
Kostak, Victor R. (Department: 2711)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput
Remote data accessing
Accessing a remote server
C348S086000, C455S001000, C345S215000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06173317
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 browers, 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 enables client computer(s) to retrieval and display synchronized annotated multimedia streams from servers dispersed over a diverse computer network which includes local area networks (LANs) and/or wide area networks (WANs) such as the internet. Multimedia streams provided to the client computer(s) can include a compressed video stream for display in a video window and an accompanying compressed audio stream. Annotations, i.e., displayable events, include textual/graphical data in the form of HTML pages with Java applets to be displayed in one or more event windows.
In one embodiment, the video/audio and annotation streams are produced by a capture module and an author module, and 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 suitable compression format, depending on the desired resolution(s) and frame rate(s). The author module then generates synchronization scripts which include annotation streams which are synchronized with the compressed video/audio streams.
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.
Video/audio streams and annotation streams are provided by the stream server(s) to the client computer(s) in a coordinated manner, so that the client computer(s) is able to synchronously display the video frames and displayable event(s) in a video window and event window(s), respectively. In this embodiment, annotation streams include a flipper stream for locating HTML pages and a ticker stream which include ticker (tape) data.
The client computer also provides a table of contents displayed concurrently with the video window and the event window. The table of contents includes content labels which enable the viewer to skip forward or backward to one or more predetermined locations in the video stream.
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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Cannon Anthony
Chaddha Navin
Dean Dawson
del Val David
Gupta Anoop
Kostak Victor R.
Microsoft Corporation
Schwegman Lundberg Woessner & Kluth P.A.
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