Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Raymond Cheng

Vishal Sood

Fan Yang

Anirban Roy

Lidong Zhou

Jack E Freelander

Ming Wu

Youshan Miao

Ji Hong

Xuetian Weng

Aapo Kyrola

Naveen Thumpudi

Wei-Ge Chen

Serge Smirnov

Sam J George

Harry S Pyle

John A Bocharov

Lin Liu

Ning Lin

Sudheer Sirivara

Krishna Prakash Duggaraju

Timothy E Onders

Geqiang (Sam) Zhang

Christopher Stephen Messer

Pu Su

Jeffrey M Wilcox

A multispeed playback system is described herein that allows for playback of smooth streaming media presentations at speeds other than the normal speed or direction, while still using an underlying platform that does not natively support multispeed. The system provides frames to the underlying platform so that the platform is still playing 1&#xd7; content while the system manipulates video and/or audio samples being fed to the platform to make rendered data look appropriately for a selected speed and direction. The system may feed the underlying platform frames at a faster rate or skip every other frame for faster playback, or may feed each frame to the underlying platform multiple times for slower playback. Thus, the multispeed playback system allows a client application developer to provide users with expected multispeed playback at the client without encoding multiple different streams at the server.

Virtual playback speed modification

A continuous stream data (e.g., messages, tweets) is received by ingest nodes of a platform. The ingest nodes may analyze the data to create a transaction of graph updates, assign a sequence number to the transaction, and distribute the graph updates with the sequence number to graph nodes of the platform. The graph nodes may store graph updates from ingest nodes, and then the ingest nodes may report graph update progresses in a progress table. A snapshot may be taken based on the progress table, and then graph-mining computation may be implemented. Tolerate failures and decaying may be supported and incremental expansion may be allowed to cope with increasing update rates and computation needs.

Platform for continuous graph update and computation

Embodiments are directed to pacing on-demand linear advertisement entries to appear as being live entries, to generating a sequential segment map from a parallel playlist and to consolidating linear ad and main content portions into a single linear chunklist. In one embodiment, a computer system receives video content updates for a portion of live video programming, and generates a parallel playlist with parallel playlist entries that identify a presentation that is to be played. The computer system then generates a sequential segment map from the parallel playlist that identifies which parallel playlist entry is to be played, monitors a live position for new media, determines that an on-demand linear advertisement is to be played at the live position, and appends on-demand linear advertisement chunks to a chunklist to replace the main content chunks and play the on-demand linear advertisement entries in a pseudo-live format as if they were live.

Overwriting existing media content with viewer-specific advertisements

An adaptive stream player that has control over whether a retrieved stream is cached in a local stream cache. For at least some of the stream portions requested by the player, before going out over the network, a cache control component first determines whether or not an acceptable version of the stream portion is present in a stream cache. If there is an acceptable version in the stream cache, that version is provided rather than having to request the stream portion of the network. For stream portions received over the network, the cache control component decides whether or not to cache that stream portion. Thus, the cache control component allows the adaptive stream player to work in offline scenarios and also allows the adaptive stream player to have rewind, pause, and other controls that use cached content.

Cache control for adaptive stream player

A streaming abstraction system is described herein that provides application developers a client software development kit (SDK) on top of which to build smooth streaming solutions. The system reduces development time considerably and abstracts platform specific intricacies and protocol handling on the client. In addition, the streaming abstraction system makes it possible to monetize streaming content with advanced features like advertising and analytics and provides advanced capabilities like multiple camera angles, diagnostics, and error handling. In some embodiments, the streaming abstraction system provides an intermediate layer that operates between an application and an underlying client media platform. The intermediate layer manages smooth streaming protocol handling as well as interactions with the platform-specific runtime.

Smooth streaming client component

A compressed digital audio signal is transmitted from an audio source along a connection wire to an audio receiver. The digital audio signal can encode digital audio data having different sampling frequencies, frames sizes, and other information. The audio receiver that receives the digital audio signal can decode and convert the compressed digital audio signal into multiple synchronized analog signals, which are used to drive multiple speakers. The audio receiver may also synchronize the audio data with associated video data so that the audio playback and video playback are 'in sync', despite delay introduced by the audio signal decoding at the audio receiver.

Digital audio processing

Growing community of inventors

Sammamish, WA, United States of America

Raymond Cheng