TIVO's "multimedia time warping" patent.

[alan92rttt]

TIVO has just won a judgement from Dish TV over Dish's DVr's. They took Dish to court over a patent they hold for a "multimedia time warping system" (details here) Coultd this same patent be used against sage? Is this something all media centers owners should worry about?

[matt91]

A multimedia time warping system.
The invention allows the user to store selected television broadcast programs while the user is simultaneously watching or reviewing another program. A preferred embodiment of the invention accepts television (TV) input streams in a multitude of forms, for example, National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) or PAL broadcast, and digital forms such as Digital Satellite System (DSS), Digital Broadcast Services (DBS), or Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC). The TV streams are converted to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation and are parsed and separated it into video and audio components. The components are stored in temporary buffers. Events are recorded that indicate the type of component that has been found, where it is located, and when it occurred. The program logic is notified that an event has occurred and the data is extracted from the buffers. The parser and event..


http://www.google.com/patents?id=Ieo...J&dq=6,233,389

[CollinR]

Maybe this is why SageTV doesn't use a "temperary buffer" it is continually written to disk. Thats why the files close between shows on the program guide.

Beyond TV and IIRC MCE do however use a temperary video buffer.


However just by looking at the specifications I'm thinking the two processes are pretty different. Look at figure 9.

[dotheDVDeed]

And didn't ReplayTV have this same technology? How can Tivo claim it as theirs?

1999 CES Best of Show
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m..._6/ai_53524364

First model released two months before Tivo

[mohanman]

Ahhh.. rubbish.
Tivo is the best, hands down.

[jsonnabend]

Does Sage store the audio and video streams on disk separately, or does it simply save the MPEG onto disk?

- Jeff

[blade]

Saves it as an mpeg.

[jsonnabend]

Originally Posted by blade

Saves it as an mpeg.

Well, I haven't analyzed the patent, and I certainly haven't read the file history, but I think that knocks out every claim with possibly the exception of 31 and 61. Did anyone read the decision(s) to see which claims were found infringed?

- Jeff

[Ryokurin]

Basically, what the patent calls for is taking a video stream, converting it to mpeg, then separating the audio and video into separate pieces for storage, and then doing the reverse to play it back. This actually allows them to get away with using pretty low end hardware (for instance, the Series 1 was a 54mhz PowerPC chip. The HD ones are 300mhz mips chips) Because Sage, BTV and so forth don't separate the video and audio on the fly they should be safe.

FWIW, Echostar got slapped by reverse engineering a first gen Tivo box, and refused to license the technology. DirectTV paid. The only other one I can think of this affecting is maybe Moxi, but they are almost dead as it is.

[jsonnabend]

Originally Posted by Ryokurin

Basically, what the patent calls for is taking a video stream, converting it to mpeg, then separating the audio and video into separate pieces for storage, and then doing the reverse to play it back. This actually allows them to get away with using pretty low end hardware (for instance, the Series 1 was a 54mhz PowerPC chip. The HD ones are 300mhz mips chips) Because Sage, BTV and so forth don't separate the video and audio on the fly they should be safe.

FWIW, Echostar got slapped by reverse engineering a first gen Tivo box, and refused to license the technology. DirectTV paid. The only other one I can think of this affecting is maybe Moxi, but they are almost dead as it is.

That's how I read most of the claims. What about claims 31 and 61? I didn't read those as requiring the separate storage of video and audio streams, but I may have missed it.

- Jeff

[Ryokurin]

Nope, it separates, at least as I read it, and how others have understood it. It makes sense anyways, as remember they had to deal with mid 90s technology during the development. Keeping the streams separate is what allows them to use such a weak processor (it was a PPC, but its FPU was gutted along with other things) as they could push the sound to another chip until the final conversion, and it probably would have kept the I/O bandwidth down a little in the process.

I did some research into the original trial and basically it was about the 'media switch' which is hardware, more than just doing something similar in software, as the switch is what made it possible to do on low end hardware. it would be kind of hard to use the same tactics on a PC since basically anything made in the past 10 years is probably more powerful than what a settop Tivo box needs to get its job done.

[jsonnabend]

Interesting. You deal with patents professionally?

- Jeff