Patent ID: 8199718

Claim:
An apparatus for splicing a multimedia stream session on communication networks, comprising: a handoff manager for monitoring whether a mobile host is roaming to other subnets or not, and acquiring a new IP address and issuing a first control signal when a handoff event is triggered during an ongoing session; a session migration manager for monitoring whether a media client triggers a migration action during an ongoing session, and sending a state message to a target host for performing session migration, enabling a media player, and issuing a second control signal when a migration action event is triggered; and a session splicing module for respectively receiving said first and second control signals, and performing a corresponding session splicing for each control signal to keep said ongoing session continuous for said mobile host or said media client; wherein said session splicing module implements a metadata reconstruction mechanism for extracting metadata and reconstructing the extracted metadata to support session splicing of a non-linear multimedia stream session transmitted with metadata-gathering format in addition to session splicing of a linear multimedia stream session transmitted with metadata-spreading format.