SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR RECORDING AND PLAYING BACK MULTIMEDIA EVENTS

摘要

A system for recording and playing back multimedia events includes recording sources, a preprocessor, a delivery processor, and user control units. The recording sources each captures a continuous temporal record or track of the multimedia event and transmit the captured track to the source preprocessor where tracks are coded into digital blocks and digitized blocks of tracks received simultaneously are time stamped with the same relative time, and therefore synchronized in time. Tracks of the multimedia event are also compressed and preprocessed to generate other representations of the multimedia event, which further assist users in searching through the media event. The delivery processor services users' requests for multimedia events and delivers events to requesting users according to users' interactive commands. The delivery also generates stacked representations of the tracks of the multimedia event which representations provide visual cues to assist the user in conducting rapid and intelligent searches through the multimedia event. The user control unit receives requests and interactive commands from the user to be transmitted to the delivery processors and multimedia events from the delivery processor for presentation to the user.