Apple granted patents involving QuickTime, iTunes, iPod Dock
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Apr 29, 2008 at 12:12pm
Apple has been granted patents involving QuickTime, iTunes and the iPod Dock by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.
Patent number 7366975 is for a method and apparatus for allowing a media client to obtain media data from a media server. The inventor is Daniel I. Lipton.
According to Apple, some embodiments of the invention provide a computer system that includes a media server, a media client, and a media-server interface. The media server application produces media data, where the media data has a plurality of segments. For example, in some embodiments, the media data is a movie with video and audio components. In this example, the segments of the movie can be specified in two groups, where one group includes the frames of video in the movie and the other group includes the seconds of audio in the movie.
The media client application is typically an application that needs to process the media data of the media server application without the need to have any familiarity with the implementation of the media server application. The media-server interface directs the server application to successively generate individual segments of the media data and to store each generated segment in a location that is accessible by the media client. The server application generates each segment in a format that is comprehensible to the media client application. The media client application retrieves each segment from its stored location and processes the segment.
Patent number 73667885 is for a method and apparatus for media data transmission. The inventors are Anne Jones, Jay Geagan, Kevin L. Gong, Alagu Periyannan and David W. Singer.
According to Apple, methods and apparatuses for processing media data transmitted in a data communication medium are involved. A digital processing system is provided with a time related sequence of media data provided to the digital processing system based on a set of data, wherein the set of data indicates a method to transmit the time related sequence of media data according to a transmission protocol. The set of data, itself, is a time related sequence of data associated with the time related sequence of media data. The time related sequence of media data may be presented and/or stored by the digital processing system.
Patent number 7366199 is for a method and apparatus that measures bandwidth. The inventors are Gregory Vaughan and Mythili Devineni.
According to Apple, the patent is for a network that connects several computers, a method of determining the network bandwidth between two computers. The method measures a first time interval between when one of the computers (1) sends a first data set to the other computer and (2) receives a first response. It also measures a second time interval between when one of the computers (1) sends a second data set to the other computer and (2) receives a second response. The method then identifies the network bandwidth from the two measured time intervals.
Patent number D567800 is for the ornamental design for a stand. The inventors are Bartley K. Andre, Daniel J. Coster, Daniele De Iuliis, Richard P. Howarth, Jonathan P. Ive, Duncan Robert Kerr, Shin Nishiboro, Matthew Dean Rohrbach, Douglas B. Satzger, Calin Q. Seid, Christopher J. Stringer, Eugene Antony Whang and Rico Zorkendorfer. The graphic below is a front perspective view of a stand embodying the design.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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