WO2012032174A1

WO2012032174A1 - A digital video recorder system connectable to devices running a web browser

Info

Publication number: WO2012032174A1
Application number: PCT/EP2011/065688
Authority: WO
Inventors: Kenneth William Tindell
Original assignee: Vidiactive Ltd
Priority date: 2010-09-10
Filing date: 2011-09-09
Publication date: 2012-03-15
Also published as: GB201015118D0

Abstract

An improved DVR system which has a system device which is connected to a TV screen and a household computer network. The system is operable from a remote control device and OSD (on-screen display) and is simultaneously operable from any computer directly or indirectly connected to the household computer network utilising a standard web browser.

Description

A DIGITAL VIDEO RECORDER SYSTEM CONNECTABLE TO DEVICES RUNNING A WEB BROWSER

A conventional DVR records digital TV programme broadcasts (from terrestrial transmitters, satellites or cable) to a local hard disk. It provides an on-screen display (OSD) that allows the viewer to interact with the DVR to browse and select recordings, control playback, delete recordings and create new ones by setting timers from an Electronic Programme Guide (EPG).

It has been realised by the present applicant that there is a need for the use of the DVR from different locations in a household for both viewing and control and to share the discovery of new TV programmes with other people through existing social networking services.

Thus and in accordance with the present invention there is provided an improved DVR system comprising of a system device connected to a TV screen and a household computer network, said system being operable from a remote control device and OSD and simultaneously operable from any computer directly or indirectly connected to the household computer network providing a standard web browser.

The invention will now be described further and by way of example only with reference to the attached figures and examples:-

Figure 1 shows one embodiment of a system in accordance with the present invention;

Figure 2 shows an example of a method for sharing a TV program in accordance with the present invention. Referring now to Figure 1, this shows one embodiment of a system in accordance with the present invention in schematic form.

The system of the invention comprises a DVR (hereinafter referred to as a "Vidirecorder") (1). The Vidirecorder is connected to the Internet (6) via a home network (4) using an appropriate communications protocol, for example but not limited to Ethernet or WiFi. The Vidirecorder obtains video signals from conventional TV sources (5) from any of satellite, DVB-T, analogue, cable TV or IPTV hardware. The video signals are displayed on a conventional TV screen (2) using HDMI, SCART or other standard methods. When watching the TV the system can be controlled with a remote control (3).

The Vidirecorder stores TV programme recordings in conventional non-volatile storage (for example, but not limited to, hard disk, solid state memory) provided internally of the box or externally connected using conventional technology (e.g. USB, Firewire) or network-attached storage using standard mechanisms (e.g. CIFS, NFS, AFP). The Vidirecorder also stores TV programme metadata (including but not limited to title, description, subtitles, TV channel recorded, time recorded and duration).

The Vidirecorder can be connected to devices running web browsers (including but not limited to laptop computers, smartphones, tablets) connected directly or indirectly to the home computer network (8) by using standard networking protocols such as TCP/IP, mDNS, NetBIOS, HTTP.

The Vidirecorder can connect across the internet to a computer server that stores and retrieves TV programme metadata associated with a unique short internet URL using a simple API (7). The system hereinbefore described is shown schematically in Figures 1 and/or 2 and the system can be operated in accordance with the following examples to achieve unique improved features and functionality of a DVR.

Watching TV programmes in a web browser

A viewer with a web browsing device connected to the home network goes to a web page served by a web server contained within the Vidirecorder. The URL for the Vidirecorder is of a known form. The device address part of the URL appears at a known address. This is either a numeric address known to the viewer, or a symbolic address found through the Domain Name System (DNS) to which the device makes queries, or a symbolic address found through another protocol (including but not limited to mDNS, UPnP, NetBIOS). The known address can be assigned manually by the viewer through the OSD and remote control or automatically by the Vidirecorder itself based on a unique identifier or other methods (such as are embodied in, for example, UPnP) to ensure that no more than once device shares the same name.

The web site contained within the Vidirecorder displays information useful to the viewer, which may include but not be limited to a list TV programme recordings with available metadata, the space available on the disk, the contents of the Electronic Programme Guide and links to web sites on other Vidirecorders connected to the same home network.

The list of TV programme recordings may include recordings that are in progress but not available to watch yet, recordings that can be watched, and recordings that will be made in the future based on the viewer's requests. The display of TV programmes may be categorised according to attributes including but not limited to those that have been recently recorded, those that have already been watched. Different TV programmes from the same series may also be displayed in a collection. Functions to manage TV programme recordings are provided on the web site using web features such as buttons and links. These functions include but are not limited to the deleting of TV programmes and future recordings, the adding of metadata such as tags and keywords, the editing of existing metadata such as the title, the marking of a TV programme as more or less important than normal, the marking of a TV programme as to be made available or not made available for streaming and the saving of a TV programme to nonvolatile storage available to the browsing device. The web server also provides a parental control functions that blocks access to certain TV programmes according to metadata

(including but not limited to the rating of the TV programme and time of recording) by requiring a PIN or other authentication token. In the preferred embodiment of the invention the web site serves JavaScript functions which make use of Ajax calls to the web server to provide an interactive web application.

A TV programme may be viewed through the web browser of the browsing device by navigating to a page that contains the desired video made available through web video player. The viewer can watch the TV programme in the same manner as web video is watched from conventional web video sites (e.g. YouTube). This may include but is not limited to play, pause, seek, volume and full-screen options. The operation of the web video aspect of the invention can take place concurrently with the operation of the conventional DVR functions of the video recorder (e.g. another viewer controlling the OSD with the remote control and watching a TV programme).

In a typical embodiment of the invention, the web video player is encoded with the Adobe Flash standard and the video provided to the Flash web video player encoded using the H.264 video standard. It is commonplace that conventional TV is broadcast in a video format (e.g. MPEG2) that is not compatible with common web video formats (e.g. H.264) or easily decoded (e.g. 1080p30 H.264 cannot be decoded in real-time on some low-cost browsing devices such as netbooks). In these cases the Vidirecorder undertakes a transcoding process to convert the video from one format to another. This may be done by using commonly available hardware (e.g. the Maxim MG3500 device) or by a software emulation (e.g. using the widely known ffmpeg library). Depending on the hardware used to embody the invention, the transcoding process may not take place in real-time and so the Vidirecorder may store a work-in-progress copy of the transcoded TV programme in non-volatile storage.

The Vidirecorder provides a streaming web service for sending the appropriately encoded video to the web video player running on a browsing device. There are a number of known methods for streaming including, but not limited to, the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), HTTP Progressive Download (HPD) and HTTP Pseudo-streaming (HPS). The preferred embodiment of the invention uses HPS serving an H.264 file encoded to no higher than 720p30 Baseline Profile so that hardware accelerated video decode is possible on a wide range of browsing devices. As well as streaming video the Vidirecorder provides real-time metadata such as subtitle information. In the preferred embodiment for DVB TV the subtitles in the original MPEG Transport Stream are extracted into bitmaps in PNG format along with the timing information, the served web video player accesses and uses this timing information to acquire and place the subtitle bitmaps over the video playback at the appropriate playback point.

Conditional Access and encryption

The invention provides for the use of Conditional Access (CA) hardware to control access to TV programmes. The CA hardware is used for conventional DVR functions (to decrypt live TV or TV programmes recorded to the non-volatile storage and display the video on the TV screen). It is also necessary to use the CA hardware to decrypt a TV programme as part of the transcoding process. It may also be a requirement to re-encrypt the TV programme in the new transcoded format before storing it in non-volatile storage. This re-encryption may be undertaken with a hardware device or a software emulation. In an embodiment of the invention using the DVB standard the re-encryption is done such that the included CA hardware can be used to decrypt the transcoded video in real-time as part of the web streaming.

The Vidirecorder extends CA to the web browser by using Digital Rights Management (DRM) methods for TV programmes that are required to have higher protection than normal web streaming. The preferred embodiment of the invention uses a secure streaming method where the web server embeds a token within the Flash web video player before serving it to the browser and generates a one-time unique URL corresponding to the video file. The Flash web video player makes a secure HTTPS connection to the Vidirecorder web server and sends the token in an HTTPS request to authenticate the player and the connection. When the connection is terminated the one-time unique URL association with the video file is deleted.

Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) function

One part of the web site of the Vidirecorder provides access to EPG information. The EPG information can be obtained from the metadata encoded in the transport stream of the TV broadcasts or can be obtained from a server located on the internet. The EPG information is displayed according to preferences set by the viewer including but not limited to favourite channels and highlighting of favourite TV programmes. The web EPG includes but is not limited to functions for searching the TV schedule, for adding and deleting recordings, for resolving recording clashes, and for adding recordings automatically that match viewer-defined search criteria.

Advertising

The Vidirecorder web site may include advertisements in the served web pages using known methods. The advertisements may also include 'pre-roller' video advertisements before the playback of recorded TV programmes begins. Inserting video advertisements into the playback is done by identifying points that are natural breaks in the flow of the programme. The Vidirecorder obtains metadata describing these points from a server located on the internet that correlates the viewing habits of many diverse people who have watched the same TV recording on the TV and have used the remote control to skip through the recording or have used the web video player to skip.

Social networking of TV programmes

The Vidirecorder provides a method for the viewer to share with other people references to a TV programme so that other people can arrange to watch the same TV programme. The process is described with reference to the Figure 2.

The viewer using a browsing device (1) first requires a plugin button to be installed into their browser hereafter known as a vidiact.it button. In the preferred embodiment of the invention the vidiact.it button is a bookmarklet that is installed by a simple drag-and-drop from a button on the web page and where the button features prominently on the Vidirecorder web site. Pressing the vidiact.it button on a web page served from the Vidirecorder corresponding to a TV recording (whether streamable or not) causes a program in the browser to run and extract details of the TV programme including but not limited to title, description, current play point, channel and start time. This information is passed in to a web server on the internet (2) and used to create a new page with a unique short URL (hereafter referred to as a VidiURL). The VidiURL page is dynamically presented and has contents that includes a representation of the metadata used on initial creation.

As well as displaying the metadata the VidiURL page also contains functions for sharing the VidiURL to communications services (3) that include but are not limited to e-mail,

microblogging, instant messaging and social networking (in one embodiment of the invention a button for the 'AddThis' service is included on the VidiURL page). The VidiURL may be clicked on by various recipients of the link (4).

The VidiURL page dynamically creates target links for the TV programme based on

characteristics of the viewer of the page. If the page is viewed by someone using a browsing device on their home computer network where one or more Vidirecorders (5) are connected to this home network (6) then the page includes a link for each of these Vidirecorders. The device part of the URL for such a link refers to the corresponding Vidirecorder. The remainder of the URL indicates the metadata for the TV programme described by the VidiURL.

There are several methods by which the VidiURL web server on the internet calculates the device part of the URL for the corresponding Vidirecorders. One method is for the viewer to register an account with the VidiURL web server, to add the address details of the Vidirecorders manually and for the VidiURL server to use the association between the viewer and the Vidirecorders. A second method is for the first Vidirecorder on the home network to always respond to a predetermined device address (such as 'vidirecorder.local'). A third method is for each Vidirecorder to periodically register its local address with the VidiURL server. The VidiURL server builds a dynamic database mapping the public IP address of each Vidirecorder to its address used on the home computer network and to use this database to match the public IP address with the public IP address of the viewer's browser device used to access the VidiU RL page. The preferred embodiment of the invention is to use this third method.

There are several methods by which the TV programme metadata is passed to the web server. The first is for the URL itself to encode the metadata as parameters encoded in a query string. The second is for the query string to refer to the VidiURL and for the web server in the

Vidirecorder to make a request to the VidiURL server and obtain the metadata using the VidiURL as a key. The third is for the web server to use the HTTP referrer field in the header for the request (i.e. clicks on the link from the VidiURL page itself are treated differently to links from other pages). The preferred embodiment of the invention is the second method.

The web server in the Vidirecorder uses the obtained metadata for the page request to identify the TV programme and serve an appropriate page. If the TV programme has already been recorded and is ready for playback then the page provides a function to take the viewer to the last viewed point defined by the VidiURL metadata. If the TV programme has not been recorded but appears in the TV schedule then the page provides a function to add the TV programme to the recording schedule. The VidiURL metadata includes links to where the programme appears on TV catchup web sites (including but not limited to BBC iPlayer, SeeSaw, 40D, Demand5, ITV Player, Sky Player) and the page includes these links. Other informational links are also included in the metadata and added to the page (including but not limited to links to the Internet Movie Database and discussion forums corresponding to the TV programme).

One method by which the VidiURL server adds metadata is by using the initial metadata in a search of TV catchup web sites and other TV related sites. A second method is for users of the VidiURL web site to add and edit metadata.

Claims

Claim 1: An improved digital video recorder (DVR) system comprising of a system device connected to a TV screen and household computer network, said system being operable from a remote control device and on-screen display (OSD) and simultaneously is operable for any computer directly or indirectly connected to the household computer network providing a standard web browser.

Claim 2: An improved DVR system according to Claim 1 in which the DVR is connected to the internet via the home network and also various other signals for display on a conventional TV arrangement.

Claim 3: An improved DVR system according to Claim 1 or Claim 2 wherein the digital images can be displayed on a TV screen or monitor.

Claim 4: An improved DVR system according to any one of Claims 1 to 3 whereby video signals or an appropriate frequency can be viewed in a web browser environment.

Claim 5: An improved DVR system according to Claim 4 in which the DVR can connect 2 devices running a web browser for example laptops, tablets, smart phones.

Claim 6: An improved DVR system according to any one of Claims 1 to 5 in which a web video player is used preferably an Adobe Flash Web Player encoded in a suitable way.

Claim 7: An improved DVR system according to any one of Claims 1 to 6 wherein the system provides for the use of conditional access (CA) hardware is used to control access to any of the video signals received.

Claim 8: An improved DVR system substantially as herein before described and with reference to the accompanying drawings.