A method and apparatus for secure transfer and playback of multimedia content enables the secure transfer of multimedia content from a digital video recorder (DVR) to a personal computer (PC) and further to a handheld device. A DVR determines which devices on a Local Area Network (LAN) are authorized to share and/or retrieve content from the DVR. The DVR receives a connection request from a PC on the LAN, authorizes the connection request and establishes a secure connection between the DVR and the PC. Once the secure connection is established, the DVR receives a request for multimedia content from the PC, prepares the multimedia content for transfer and transfers the multimedia content to the PC.

A method and apparatus for secure transfer and playback of multimedia content enables the secure transfer of multimedia content from a digital video recorder (DVR) to a personal computer (PC) and further to a handheld device. A DVR determines which devices on a Local Area Network (LAN) are authorized to share and/or retrieve content from the DVR. The DVR receives a connection request from a PC on the LAN, authorizes the connection request and establishes a secure connection between the DVR and the PC. Once the secure connection is established, the DVR receives a request for multimedia content from the PC, prepares the multimedia content for transfer and transfers the multimedia content to the PC.

A method and apparatus for secure transfer and playback of multimedia content enables the secure transfer of multimedia content from a digital video recorder (DVR) to a personal computer (PC) and further to a handheld device. A DVR determines which devices on a Local Area Network (LAN) are authorized to share and/or retrieve content from the DVR. The DVR receives a connection request from a PC on the LAN, authorizes the connection request and establishes a secure connection between the DVR and the PC. Once the secure connection is established, the DVR receives a request for multimedia content from the PC, prepares the multimedia content for transfer and transfers the multimedia content to the PC.

A method and apparatus for displaying branded video tags. An advertiser provides additional content associated with broadcast advertising content to a service provider that downloads the additional content to a digital video recorder (DVR). The service provider inserts command tags into the content that are intercepted by the DVR and interpreted as commands that instruct the DVR to perform specific actions when the DVR receives the stream from a broadcaster. The DVR intercepts and translates any tags inserted into the content stream while the DVR is playing the content stream. Tags can cause the DVR to display a branded video tag to the user which is a displayed icon that requests an interaction by the user and has an advertiser’s logo(s) displayed in its vicinity.

Optical devices and cognitive prosthetics based on novel components for enhanced human vision, selective video/television display, digital processing and/or unique image analysis to modify the image that a user sees and significantly improve the perception of that user are disclosed. What the user sees is responsive to specific perceptual and informational needs of the user in real time. Devices from the parent patents are herein made both more useful in practical day-to-day use and are more widely applicable to improving the ability of a user to perceive visual stimuli.

A method and apparatus for displaying branded video tags. An advertiser provides additional content associated with broadcast advertising content to a service provider that downloads the additional content to a digital video recorder (DVR). The service provider inserts command tags into the content that are intercepted by the DVR and interpreted as commands that instruct the DVR to perform specific actions when the DVR receives the stream from a broadcaster. The DVR intercepts and translates any tags inserted into the content stream while the DVR is playing the content stream. Tags can cause the DVR to display a branded video tag to the user which is a displayed icon that requests an interaction by the user and has an advertiser's logo(s) displayed in its vicinity.

Optical devices based on novel components for selective video/television display, digital processing and/or unique image analysis to modify the image that a user sees and significantly improve the perception of that user are disclosed. What the user sees is responsive to specific perceptual and informational needs of the user in real time. Devices from the previous (parent) patents are herein made both more useful in practical day-to-day use and more widely applicable to improving the ability of a user to perceive visual stimuli.

Systems, devices and automated processes provide robust, computationally-efficient and secure protection of media content or other electronic data stored on a user-supplied storage device through the use of efficient file system encryption. Only certain portions of the content are encrypted by the host device, thereby reducing the computational demand in comparison to encrypting all of the content. By selecting the particular portions to encrypt, the formatting and structure of the stored data can be concealed, thereby making the use of the unencrypted content very difficult, if not impossible. In implementations based upon the XFS file system, for example, the superblocks that store header information about the files stored on the drive can be encrypted, thereby rendering the unencrypted content

Robust, computationally-efficient and secure systems, devices and automated processes are described for storing content on a disk drive or other storage device that is supplied to a media encoder or other host device. The user-supplied drive may be used, for example, to store content in a digital video recorder (DVR) or the like. The host device creates two separate digital identifiers that separately identify the host device and the user, respectively, so that subsequent pairing can be performed based upon either identifier. The two identifiers are stored on the storage device and rendered upon subsequent pairing for validation by the host device.

According to one embodiment, an information device includes a request command transmission unit and an information reception unit. The request command transmission unit transmits, to an external device, a request command for obtaining information of one or more unique commands executable only by the external device from the external device. The information reception unit receives the information of one or more unique commands requested by the request command from the external device.