Method and apparatus for storing an interactive television program

An apparatus for storing an interactive television program on a storage medium, and for playing back said stored interactive television program at a later point in time, said interactive television program comprising at least one interactive television application, said applications being transmit inside modules through a data carousel within a transport stream, wherein said apparatus comprises:

• a receiver for receiving said transport stream;
• a parser for parsing the transport stream for application modules;
• means for generating a respective header for each parsed application module;
• and
• storing means for storing, by incrementally recording, said application modules as a concatenation of modules in a single file having a structure that is built up during recording, without waiting for the completion of parsing the transport stream for application modules,
• wherein the single file comprises a storage stream, whereby said storage stream is stored on said storage medium outside of and separately from said transport stream by said storing means, and wherein said single file comprises a sequence of stored application modules, each stored application module being preceded by the generated respective header, and each generated respective header comprising storage information on at least the subsequent application module,
• wherein each of said generated respective headers comprises at least:
• a version number of the module,
• a time the module was finished loading from the transport stream,
• directories and objects contained in the module,
• pointers to the objects located in the module, and
• a pointer to the start of the next module header in the stream.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having embodied thereon a computer program for processing by a computer, enabling storing of an interactive television program on a storage medium, and playing back of the stored interactive television program at a later point in time, wherein said interactive television program comprises at least one interactive television application being transmitted inside modules through a data carousel within a transport stream, the computer program comprising code segments for causing the computer to:

• receive said transport stream,
• parse the transport stream for application modules,
• generate a respective header for each parsed application module, and
• store, by incrementally recording, said application modules as a concatenation of modules in a single file having a structure that is built up during recording, without waiting for the completion of parsing the transport stream for application modules,
• wherein the single file comprises a storage stream, whereby said storage stream is stored on said storage medium outside of and separately from said transport stream, and wherein said single file comprises a sequence of stored application modules, each stored application module being preceded by the generated respective header, and each generated respective header comprising storage information on at least the subsequent application module,
• wherein each of said generated respective headers comprises at least:
• a version number of the module,
• a time the module was finished loading from the transport stream,
• directories and objects contained in the module,
• pointers to the objects located in the module, and
• a pointer to the start of the next module header in the stream.