Systems and methods are provided to implement and facilitate cross-fading, interstitials and other effects/processing of two or more media elements in a personalized media delivery service. Effects or crossfade processing can occur on the broadcast, publisher or server-side, but can still be personalized to a specific user, in a manner that minimizes processing on the downstream side or client device. The cross-fade can be implemented after decoding, processing, re-encoding, and rechunking the relevant chunks of each component clip. Alternatively, the cross-fade or other effect can be implemented on the relevant chunks in the compressed domain, thus obviating any loss of quality by re-encoding. A large scale personalized content delivery service can limit the processing to essentially the first and last chunks of any file, there being no need to process the full clip.

A method, apparatus and system for facilitating navigation toward a region of interest in an extended scene of video content include determining a timeline including information regarding at least one region of interest in the video content and displaying, in a portion of the video content currently being displayed, a visual indicator indicating a direction in which to move in the video content to cause the display of the at least one region of interest. In one embodiment of the present principles a timeline is attached to the content and carries information evolving over time about the region(s) of interest. A renderer processes the timeline and provides navigation information to a user using available means such as a graphical representation or haptic information, or a combination of several means.

The techniques described herein relate to methods, apparatus, and computer readable media configured to perform media processing tasks. A media processing entity includes a processor in communication with a memory, wherein the memory stores computer-readable instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform receiving, from a remote computing device, multi-view multimedia data comprising a hierarchical track structure comprising at least a first track comprising first media data at a first level of the hierarchical track structure, and a second track comprising task instruction data at a second level in the hierarchical track structure that is different than the first level of the first track. The instructions further cause the processor to perform processing the first media data of the first track based on the task instruction data of the second track to generate modified media data and an output track that includes the modified media data.

A system for producing an encoded digital audio recording has an audio encoder that encodes a digital audio recording having a number of audio channels or audio objects. An equalization (EQ) value generator produces a sequence of EQ values which define EQ filtering that is to be applied when decoding the encoded digital audio recording, wherein the EQ filtering is to be applied to a group of one or more of the audio channels or audio objects of the recording independent of any downmix. A bitstream multiplexer combines the encoded digital audio recording with the sequence of EQ values, the latter as metadata associated with the encoded digital audio recording. Other embodiments are also described including a system for decoding the encoded audio recording.

Methods and apparatus for monitoring locally inserted media are disclosed. A disclosed apparatus includes instructions to detect, at a media device at an end user location, a frequency of a watermark that was spliced into a primary media stream received at the media device after the primary media stream was received at the end user location, associate identifying tags with segments of the primary media stream that were spliced, in response to the detection of the watermark, determine an advertisement associated with the segments of the primary media based on the identifying tags, present the primary media at a first time and the advertisement at second times, record a log including first identifying information including an identity of the content of the primary media and second identifying information including a change in the frequency of the watermark corresponding to the advertisement; and transmit the log to a data collection facility.

A method, apparatus, computer program product and computer accessible code configured to link or otherwise associate content filters with a multimedia presentation, e.g., a movie. The content filter data includes an identifier value with an aspect ratio identifier or as a function of an aspect ratio for a particular multimedia presentation associated with the filter information. In one implementation, association between a filter set and a multimedia presentation involves a filtering application that searches a particular multimedia presentation to locate aspect ratio information and further searches filter information for a matching aspect ratio identifier.

A recording device comprising at least one memory and at least one processor which function as: a setting unit configured to set a scene number; a communication unit configured to perform transmission and reception of a scene number to share the scene number with at least one other recording device; and a recording unit configured to record a file of recording data with a file name including a scene number at a start of recording the recording data and a scene number at an end of recording the recording data.

Systems and methods for performing trick play functionality using trick play streams during adaptive bitrate streaming in accordance with embodiments of the invention are disclosed. One embodiment includes requesting a video container index from a video container file containing a video stream from a plurality of alternative streams of video; requesting at least one portion of the video stream using at least one entry from the video container index; decoding the at least one portion of the video stream; receiving at least one user instruction to perform a visual search of the media; requesting a trick play container index from a trick play container file containing a trick play stream; requesting at least one frame of video from the at least one trick play stream; and decoding and displaying the at least one frame of video from the trick play stream.

A multimedia file and methods of generating, distributing and using the multimedia file are described. Multimedia files in accordance with embodiments of the present invention can contain multiple video tracks, multiple audio tracks, multiple subtitle tracks, a complete index that can be used to locate each data chunk in each of these tracks and an abridged index that can enable the location of a subset of the data chunks in each track, data that can be used to generate a menu interface to access the contents of the file and ‘meta data’ concerning the contents of the file. Multimedia files in accordance with several embodiments of the present invention also include references to video tracks, audio tracks, subtitle tracks and ‘meta data’ external to the file. One embodiment of a multimedia file in accordance with the present invention includes a series of encoded video frames, a first index that includes information indicative of the location within the file and characteristics of each encoded video frame and a separate second index that includes information indicative of the location within the file of a subset of the encoded video frames.

Techniques segmenting a video using tags without modifying video data thereof are disclosed. According to one aspect of the present invention, each tag is created to define a portion of the video, wherein the tags can be modified, edited, looped, reordered or restored to a create an impression other than that if the video was played back sequentially. The tags are so structured in a table included in a tagging file that can be shared or published electronically or modified or updated by others. Further the table may be modified to include one or more conditional or commercial tags.