Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Christopher G Knowlton

Vishal Sood

Jack E Freelander

Geqiang Zhang

Anirban Roy

William James Staples

Bret P O'Rourke

John A Bocharov

Lin Liu

Sudheer Sirivara

Michael D Volodarsky

Palamalai Gopalakrishnan

Jimin Gao

Gegiang (Sam) Zhang

Krishna Prakash (Prakash) Duggaraju

Bryan Ethan Fleming

Ravi Raman

A smooth streaming system provides a stateless protocol between a client and server in which the server embeds incremental control information in media fragments. The server provides uniform media fragment responses to media fragment requests that are cacheable by existing Internet cache infrastructure. The smooth streaming system receives media data in fragments from one or more encoders, creates an index of each fragment, and stores the fragments. The server provides fragments to clients that contain metadata information describing the encodings available on the server and the encoding of the fragment. The server may also provide information within each fragment that allows the client to determine whether the client is requesting data too fast or too slow, so that the client can adapt its request rate to a cadence in tune with the rate at which the server is receiving encoder data.

Delivering cacheable streaming media presentations

A computer system receives a request from a client computer system for data that is to be presented to a user, accesses a portion of the requested data and determines the encoded bit rate from the accessed portion of requested data. Based on the encoded bit rate for the requested data, the computer system determines an initial amount of data that is to be transferred to the client computer system to enable prompt access to that portion of data and determines the transfer rate for transferring the remaining data to the client computer system. The transfer rate for the remaining data is lower than the transfer rate for the initial amount. The computer system transfers the initial amount of data to the client computer system and transfers the remainder of the requested data to the client computer system at the determined lower transfer rate, subsequent to transferring the initial amount.

Automatic bit rate detection and throttling

The dynamic management of download rates when downloading digital resources to clients. A server concurrently maintains download sessions with any number of clients, each download session for downloading a corresponding digital resource to a corresponding client. The download rates for the various download sessions are adjusted as download sessions are completed, and as new download sessions are added. As new download sessions are initiated, a minimum and target download rate may be calculated. The target download rate is the rate at which the server will attempt to download the requested digital resource to the client, and will depend on the total available bandwidth for use to download the digital resources.

Dynamic throttling based on network conditions

An implementation of trick mode methodology receives a first request to stream media for presentation at a first normal playback rate; streams a first media stream configured to the first normal playback rate; receives a second request to stream the media for presentation at a second greater playback rate; and performs one of the following responsive to receiving the second request: switching from streaming the first media stream to streaming from an appropriate position in a second media stream that corresponds to the second greater playback rate; or in an event that a second media stream corresponding to the second greater playback rate is not available, then streaming the first media stream at a higher bit rate in an attempt to comply with the second request.

Advanced trick mode

Growing community of inventors

Redmond, WA, United States of America

Christopher G Knowlton