Disk access method for delivering multimedia and video information on demand over wide area networks
US5915094A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Jun 2, 1997 |
| Grant date | Jun 22, 1999 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Jun 2, 2017 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
- CPC primaryH04N7/17336
- WIPO fieldAudio-visual technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
A method and apparatus for delivering multimedia video data from a server (host processor) to a plurality of clients connected to a communications network. More specifically, with this invention, preprocessed video and multimedia data packets are striped across disks in units of fixed playback time, even if such units result in variable length stripes. To deliver multiple video or continuous media streams, the disks in the array are accessed simultaneously so that at any given instance, different disks are accessing the video or multimedia data for different streams. Access to the disks for reading the continuous media files is scheduled periodically, with the period equal to the back time of the stripes. Because each disk read command retrieves data for a fixed play back time, if the first read command for a continuous media stream request can be scheduled to complete on a disk within a playback time, all subsequent read commands are also guaranteed to not interfere with read commands of other streams. Data is delivered directly from the disk array to the communication network by a stream controller without being sent to the host system. Disk storage is utilized efficiently by all…
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.