Koninklijke Philips Corporation N.V.

Marvell International Limited

Bei Wang

Declan Patrick Kelly

Yang Peng

Dahua He

Jin Wang

Sheng Jin

Mo Li

Gongming Wei

Simon Blanchard

Ye Ma

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for enabling an application to cooperate with the running of a program. According to the invention, the playing control information of a program and the linking information of an application corresponding to the program are edited into a program playing control file. Through executing said playing control file, guided by the linking information and based on the running control information of the application, the application can download, run or stop to run cooperating with the playing of the optical disc program. The Solution of combining an application and a program into a playing control file will effectively cause the downloading and running of the application to cooperate with the playing of the program so as to ensure normal realization of corresponding functions.

Method and apparatus for enabling an application to cooperate with running of a program

System and methods are provided for audio management. Initial head-related transfer function (HRTF) parameters indicating an initial virtual configuration of a plurality of audio sources are determined. A first user operation is detected through a user interface. Target HRTF parameters are generated in response to the first user operation. A target virtual configuration of the plurality of audio sources is determined based at least in part on the target HRTF parameters.

Systems and methods for audio management

The invention is for player/recording systems for AN content such as DVD+RW, HDD, Blu-ray RE that record content from broadcast. To navigate through the content the player provides menus allowing the user can select content to watch. Passive content is replaced with active agents so that each piece of content will also contain a program part. The action by a user selecting a piece of content to play results in the program part being executed instead of the content being played. This program part displays menus that allow the user to navigate this particular piece of content, or alternatively, the program part may just start playing the AN content. Playing the actual content is under the control of the application. At the end of the content, the application decides the next action, such as displaying another menu. The application chooses when to exit the content (based on user action or end of content) and returns to the player menus. The invention provides more control for the content provider to control the appearance of their content.

Content with navigation support

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for editing program search information. The scene descriptive information of optical disc program is edited into a search information unit when the optical disc program is inscribed on an optical disc or optical disc program is off-line edited. Said scene descriptive information includes description of the scene elements. Then said search information unit is edited into a search information file for use in optical disc search. By means of this solution, searching of keyword information, descriptive information of the scene as well as descriptive information of scene element are unified together and directly used as information to be searched, thus the present invention, being different from the conventional search information file such as the playlist which has only the pointer information but not the descriptive information of the object to be searched, simplifies the process of enhanced search.

Method and apparatus for editing program search information

The present invention provides an extensible disc player that is upgradeable to play new content types. The player's capability can be extended by downloading an appropriate decoder from a web server via the Internet. In this way, the player can play back contents that it does not originally support. If the content type is unknown, the player will check whether the disc contains a URL for linking to a web site containing an appropriate decoder. If the disc contains the URL, the player will access the web site to download the appropriate decoder. In a similar manner, the capability of a recorder can also be expanded by downloading appropriate encoders from the Internet.

Extensible disc player

An optical disc playing system, comprises a selecting apparatus for receiving a command from a user, which requires to play a part of content of a program in the optical disc; a sending apparatus for sending a request which requires to provide the related information of said part of content; a receiving apparatus for receiving the related information; and a reading-out apparatus for reading out the received related information and said part of content. An optical disc playing method using said system comprises the steps of: receiving a command from a user, which requires to play a part of content of a program in the optical disc; sending a request which requires to provide the related information of said part of content; receiving the related information; and playing the disc in coordination with said part of content using the received related information.

Compact disc playing system and its play back method

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for optimizing optical disc navigators. According to the present invention, the optical disc player sets the optimum optical disc navigator that can be realized as the optical disc navigator for playing the optical disc by testing and adjusting basing on the optical disc navigator resources that are retrieved from the optical disc playing system (including the optical disc player, optical disc and network or other storage media) and the functions that can be realized by the default optical disc navigator within the optical disc playing system, so as to achieve the purpose of fully utilizing the resources and smooth playing.

Growing community of inventors

Shanghai, China

Bei Wang