Warm-up Player for Seamless Live Stream Navigation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional media playback systems for live content streams restrict users to watching only the live edge of the broadcast, lacking navigation options like pausing, rewinding, or fast-forwarding, and recorded-live streams introduce significant delays, affecting consumer experience.
Innovation Solution
A media player system that seamlessly switches between a live stream and a recorded-live stream using a warm-up player to pre-decode and pre-buffer the live stream at the live edge, allowing navigation and maintaining a pre-buffered warm-up stream, while a primary player decodes and generates the playback stream based on user interactions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If a recorded-live stream is used to enable navigation options, then ease of operation is improved, but loss of time increases due to significant delays
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-decodes and pre-buffers a segment of the live stream (e.g., 10 seconds) in advance using a warm-up player. This preliminary action creates a local buffer that enables immediate navigation operations without requiring full recording and processing delays, thus providing both navigation capability and reduced time loss.
2Productivity
If a warm-up player is used to pre-buffer the live stream, then productivity is improved by reducing delays, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The playback system is segmented into two independent players: a warm-up player that continuously pre-buffers live stream segments, and a primary player that handles actual playback. This segmentation allows each component to specialize in one function, improving overall productivity while managing complexity through clear separation of concerns.
Solution Approach 2:
The warm-up player acts as an intermediary between the live stream source and the primary player. It pre-processes and buffers content in advance, mediating the data flow to enable faster playback response without requiring the primary player to handle buffering operations, thus improving productivity while distributing system complexity.
3Reliability
If seamless switching between streams is implemented, then reliability is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The warm-up player continuously pre-loads stream segments in advance before they are needed for playback. This preliminary buffering action ensures that when switching between live and recorded streams is required, the transition can occur seamlessly without interruption, improving reliability while keeping the switching mechanism relatively simple.
Data Source
AI summary
Techniques are described for transparent switching between live-edge and non-live-edge playback responsive to user navigation. For example, live content is available to a user both via a live stream from a remote live edge server, and via a recorded-live stream from a remote recording server. During playback of a live content stream, a player system uses a warm-up player to continually receive, pre-decode, and pre-buffer the live stream at the live edge to maintain a pre-buffered warm-up stream; and the player system uses a primary player to decode and generate a playback stream for playback. As the user navigates playback between live-edge and non-live-edge locations, the player system can seamlessly switch between generating the playback stream based on the recorded-live stream for non-live-edge playback, or based on the pre-buffered warm-up stream for live-edge playback.