Portable viewing system
AssigneeMatsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
InventorMitsuteru Kataoka
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A main device receives program data provided through broadcasting, internally stores the received program data, and transfers the stored program data to a portable device. Herein, one program data is constituted by a plurality of program components (video, audio, closed caption, and the like). The main device assigns transfer priorities to each program component constituting one program data, and then discretely transfers the program components respectively in the direction of a time axis in the order of the assigned transfer priorities. By discretely transferring data, some of the program components may possibly be entirely transferred to the portable device even when data transfer is discontinued in a short time. Therefore, users can enjoy the entire program by playing-back the already-transferred program components.
Claims19
A portable viewing/listening system comprising a fixedly or semi-fixedly installed main device and an easy-to-carry portable device, wherein said main device is operable to receive program data and said portable device is operable to play-back the received program data so as to provide a user with the program data;
- wherein said main device comprises:
- receiving means for receiving program data provided through broadcasting;
- demultiplexing means for demultiplexing the program data received by said receiving means into program components each program component representing data of a multimedia type and spanning a same play-back length as the program data;
- primary storing means for storing the program components constituting the program data received by said receiving means;
- transfer priority assigning means for assigning a transfer priority and class to each program component constituting the program data stored in said primary storing means;
- and
- transferring means for discretely transferring, to said portable device, each of the program components of the program data stored in said primary storing means in the direction of a time axis in order of the transfer priority assigned by said transfer priority means to each program component of the program data stored in said primary storing means;
- and wherein said portable device comprises:
- secondary storing means for storing the program components to be discretely transferred from said transferring means;
- re-constructing means for re-constructing program data to be played-back from the program components constituting the program data stored in said secondary storing means;
- replacing means for substituting, when the program data stored in said secondary storing means contains an incomplete program component, the incomplete program component at a point of discontinuation of the incomplete program component with a corresponding remainder portion of another program component in a same class as the incomplete program component;
- and
- playing-back means for playing-back the program data re-constructed by said re-constructing means.
A portable device for receiving and playing-back program data received by a fixedly or semi-fixedly installed main device so as to provide a user with the received program data, said portable device comprising:
- secondary storing means for storing each program component constituting the program data to be discretely transferred from the main device, each program component representing data of a multimedia type and spanning a same play-back length as the program data;
- re-constructing means for re-constructing program data to be played-back from the program components stored in said secondary storing means;
- replacing means for substituting, when the program data stored in said secondary storing means contains an incomplete program component, the incomplete program component at a point of discontinuation of the incomplete program component with a corresponding remainder portion of another program component in a same class as the incomplete program component;
- and
- playing-back means for playing-back the program data re-constructed by said re-constructing means.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.