Method and apparatus that provides a scalable media delivery system
First Claim
1. A method of communicating multimedia digital data from a server computer to a client computer comprising the steps of:
- determining multimedia characteristics of said client computer;
determining available bandwidth of a communication channel linking said server computer and said client computer;
determining a selected set of adaptive streams containing said multimedia digital data relating to at least one of sight and sound and intended to be transmitted to said client computer based upon said determined multimedia characteristics and said determined bandwidth, said adaptive streams being stored on a memory of said server computer and formed of a base stream and a plurality of additive streams, said additive streams containing additive data which corresponds to base data associated with said base stream, such that additional additive data from each additive stream provides increasingly greater resolution of said one sight and sound; and
transmitting said selected set of adaptive streams from said server computer to said client computer.
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Accused Products
Abstract
The present invention provides an apparatus and method for encoding, storing, transmitting and decoding multimedia information in the form of scalable, streamed digital data. A base stream containing basic informational content and subsequent streams containing additive informational content are initially created from standard digital multimedia data by a transcoder. Client computers, each of which may have different configurations and capabilities are capable of accessing a stream server that contains the scalable streamed digital data. Each different client computer, therefore, may access different stream combinations according to a profile associated with each different client computer. Thus, the streams accessed from the server are tailored to match the profile of each client computer so that the best combination of streams can be provided to maximize the resolution of the 3D, audio and video components.
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Citations
80 Claims
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1. A method of communicating multimedia digital data from a server computer to a client computer comprising the steps of:
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determining multimedia characteristics of said client computer; determining available bandwidth of a communication channel linking said server computer and said client computer; determining a selected set of adaptive streams containing said multimedia digital data relating to at least one of sight and sound and intended to be transmitted to said client computer based upon said determined multimedia characteristics and said determined bandwidth, said adaptive streams being stored on a memory of said server computer and formed of a base stream and a plurality of additive streams, said additive streams containing additive data which corresponds to base data associated with said base stream, such that additional additive data from each additive stream provides increasingly greater resolution of said one sight and sound; and transmitting said selected set of adaptive streams from said server computer to said client computer. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75)
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67. A method of creating stored digital video information comprising the steps of:
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inputting a sequence of digital video pictures, each of said digital video pictures containing a plurality of slices, and each of said slices containing a plurality of blocks, each block representing one of luminance and chrominance information; segmenting said information in each of said blocks into a base stream and a plurality of additive streams, each said additive stream containing additive data that corresponds to base data associated with said base stream, such that additional additive data from each additive stream provides increasingly greater resolution of said one luminance and chrominance information for each block; associating one of a plurality of distinct stream identification codes with said base data stream and each of said additive streams; storing on a memory said plurality of distinct stream identification codes and, for each of said distinct stream identification codes, storing said associated base data or additive data so that said base data and said additive data can be identified when being read out from said memory. - View Dependent Claims (76)
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77. A method of creating stored digital adaptive stream graphics data representing a scene from digital graphics data that allows for the transmission from a server to a client computer and display of some of said stored digital adaptive stream graphics data as a sequence of graphics image frames, said method of creating stored digital adaptive stream graphics data comprising the steps of:
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creating a spatialization of said scene that identifies objects based on location and size; identifying each of said objects in said scene with an object identifier and storing location data for each object obtained from said digital graphics data with said object identifier; creating, for each of said objects identified in said scene, a plurality of adaptive object attributes and an associated plurality of adaptive object attribute identifiers, each of said object attributes corresponding to an aspect of said object; and for each of said objects, correlating different portions of said input digital graphics data with one of said adaptive object attributes; and storing each said different portion of said input digital graphics data as object attribute data along with one of said adaptive object attribute identifiers. - View Dependent Claims (78, 79, 80)
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Specification