Media Recorder

• US 20130019149A1
• Filed: 07/12/2012
• Published: 01/17/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 07/12/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Meta Platforms, Inc. (f/k/a Facebook, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Blueprint Labs, Inc. (Meta Platforms, Inc. (f/k/a Facebook, Inc.))
• Inventors: Spencer, Curtis Wayne, Garg, Avichal, Witte, Daniel Jonathan, Tieu, Christine J., Patni, Chandra Prakash, Koolwal, Aditya Brij
• Granted Patent: US 9,298,827 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/202
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G11B 2220/412 Distributed storage methods, i.e. the system may autonomously determine for a storage device that provides enough storage capacity for recording
• CPC Class Codes: G11B 27/034 on discs G11B27/036, G11B27/038 take precedence
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1014 based on the content of a request
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/2393 involving handling client requests scheduling or organising the servicing of application requests H04L67/60

Abstract

Systems and methods enabling the recording of a wide variety of online media for storage and later consumption are disclosed. The media can include audio, video, images, text and multi-media. The stored recordings can be played on internet-enabled devise such as televisions, mobile phones, personal computers, tablets, game systems, or the like. Recording is optionally accomplished using distributed recorders each making use of a virtualized browser.

Claims

1. A system comprising:

an API server configured to receive requests to record media retrieved from websites, the requests being received from remote clients of the API server;

a plurality of recorders each configured to record a type of media using a virtualized browser environment disposed on the respective recorder; and

a recording queue manager configured to assign requests to record media to members of the plurality of recorders.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the API server is configured to receive a request to record media, the request including an augmented payload having login information.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein the augmented payload is generated by a browser add-on of one of the remote clients.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders is implemented in a virtual machine.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders is configured to record text and at least one of the recorders is configured to record video.

6. The system of claim 5, wherein the at least one recorder configured to record text is configured to assemble text disposed across multiple web pages into a single document.

7. The system of claim 5, wherein the at least one recorder configured to record video is configured to assemble a video from multiple files.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders includes a physical action simulator configured to click on objects within a web page in the virtualized browser environment.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders includes a computer vision engine configured to monitor visual changes within a web page in the virtualized browser environment.

10. The system of claim 9, wherein the computer vision engine is further configured to detect the presence of video objects within the web page.

11. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders includes an advertising stitcher configured to add an advertisement to a video such that the video is recorded with the advertisement.

12. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders includes a browser instance manager configured to manage the operation of a browser in the virtualized browser environment.

13. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders includes a network &

file system listener configured to monitor file access in the virtualized browser environment.

14. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders is an administrator owned recorder and at least one of the recorders is a volunteer recorder owned by a sender of requests to record media.

15. The system of claim 1, wherein the plurality of recorders are geographically distributed.

16. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders is configured to parse a web page and identify recordable objects.

17. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders is configured to parse a web page and distinguish between

a) content of the web page that is less desirable to record and

b) content of the web page that is more desirable to record.

18. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the recorders is configured to generate additional recording requests based on identification of multiple recordable objects within a web page.

19. The system of claim 1, wherein the recording manager is configured to prioritize recording requests based on information about senders of the recording requests.

20. The system of claim 1, wherein the recording manager is configured to assign recording requests to members of the plurality of recorders based on reliability of members of the plurality of recorders.

21. The system of claim 1, wherein the recording manager is configured allocate additional recorders based on recording request demand.

22. The system of claim 1, further comprising a plurality of transcoders configured to convert recorded media into formats for communication to and display on internet enabled devices.

23. A method of recording media, the method comprising:

receiving at a server a request to record media from a webpage, the request including an address of the webpage;

placing the received request in a queue of recording requests;

assigning the received request to a recorder geographically remote from the server;

using the recorder to load the webpage into a virtualized browser environment;

parsing the loaded webpage to identify recordable objects within the webpage;

generating a first recording request for a first of the recordable objects, the first of the recordable objects including a text article disposed across multiple webpages;

generating a second recording request for a second of the recordable objects, the second of the recordable objects including a video;

assigning the first recording request to a text recorder;

assigning the second recording request to a video recorder;

saving an output of the text recorder generated in response to the first recording request; and

saving an output of the video recorder generated in response to the second recording request.