Method and apparatus for freezing a video stream on a digital television display such that the frame freeze point is before the viewer initiates the event

摘要

A viewer of a digital television trying to freeze the video at a particular frame. Generally the human delay and the delay introduced by the remote control device and the control software executing on the television results in the frame that is displayed by the freeze event is some number of frames or seconds after the frame that the viewer wanted frozen. A small amount of memory that constantly buffers several seconds of digital video such that once the viewer initiates the freeze event the frame that is displayed is effectively some seconds in the past. The viewer then has the ability to single frame step to the frame that he actually was interested in viewing. The viewer's actions are refined by a rules based algorithm that allows it to more closely target and display what it believes will be the final frame the viewer wanted to be displayed.

主权项

1. A digital television system comprising:
television content receiving part receiving television content; a processing unit, receiving user commands, and producing outputs indicative thereof, said commands relating to actions for the television content; a database containing a user profile data having multiple different user profiles, each user profile for a different viewer of the television, where each user profile is automatically compiled to model a behavior of each of the users based on prior user commands including sent user commands and those commands said user might send subsequent to the current command, said processing unit determining a sequence of commands to cause said processing unit to preemptively create and send control signals relating to television content based on additional commands previously sent by a user, without the user sending said additional commands, where one of said user commands is a freeze frame command to freeze a frame of said television content that is being displayed, and where said processing unit automatically determines a number of frames to back up based on actions a first user of the users has taken after previous freeze frame commands, where said database contains information of a genre of the current program being viewed and changes a location where the frame is frozen based on the genre.