Patent Application Number: 2005321287
This discussion forum is available to allow the community of reviewers to collaborate and discuss this patent application.
Discussion that is posted on this page will not be forwarded to IP Australia. If you wish to make comment on a prior art reference and wish that comment to be considered by the patent examiner, please do so by clicking on the relevant prior art reference.
Here are some tips to facilitate discussion.
- Flagging a post as an 'action item' signals that further research is required.
- Flagging SPAM and ABUSE helps to manage discussion
- Placing double brackets around a reference to a claim or prior art will create a hyperlink to the original, for example: [[claim 1]] and [[prior art 2]].
Facilitator's Comment 
Action Item Show without Noise
United States
Prefiltering the list of contents sent to each playback capable device is a good idea - it'll cut down on network traffic and make the selection menus shorter. Still won't solve all problems as I suspect it relies on the media being correctly labeled in the first place, but that's not really its problem. Presumably this carries over into filtering the dynamic content updates (no point in telling it somethings been added if it can't play it).
Dynamic notification of when something is added? I don't know if windows sharing does this, but it's worth checking. Does it notify on update (or removal) of directory contents?
The WD TV Live device I've got handles each networked media source as a separate device - I'm not entirely sold on the advantages of bundling all the media from all the devices into a single big list - although worth checking out what it's media library functions might do - once it's indexed each device they may all appear in a big list.
What's more fundamental is the underlying communication protocol that governs the whole information sharing, capabilities-awareness and update notification.
The whole concept with the exception of capability-based filtering is stock-standard, especially within wireless ad-hoc network. But I haven't been able to find a solid piece of prior art yet.
- Each node in the network stores content to be shared locally
- Each node includes their own capability information in the request they send to other nodes for sharable content
- Based on the capability information received, each node respond the request with only content can be consumed by the requesting node
- Any content changes will be advertised by the node in which the changes occurred
- Any capability changes will be advertised by the node in which the changes occurred
The nature of the system seems very similar to a standard distributed peer-to-peer file sharing system, with the exception of capability-based filtering for content query respond.
It is designed to enable users to share content across a private network of devices such as PCs, laptops, mobile devices, set-top boxes, etc.