Patent ID: 7676737

Claim:
A system for outputting at least one supplemental media stream designed to assist sense-impaired people in conjunction with a main media stream, the system comprising: (a) a media stream output device that outputs a main media stream and a supplemental media stream, wherein the supplemental media stream comprises captioning that displays in textual format either dialog of characters that are being displayed in the main media stream or sounds of events that occur in the main media stream; (b) a timing module that monitors the timing of the output of the main media stream and generates triggering events associated with the timing of the output of the main media stream; and (c) a media stream manager communicatively coupled to the media stream output device and to the timing module, and that: (i) obtains the main media stream; (ii) outputs the main media stream via the media stream output device; (iii) monitors for and detects triggering events associated with the timing of the output of the main media stream generated by the timing module; and (iv) upon detecting a triggering event: (A) determines that the supplemental media stream is associated with the triggering event and determines whether the supplemental media stream includes information indicating that the supplemental media stream is to be output synchronously or asynchronously and upon determining that the information indicates that the supplemental media stream is to be output asynchronously, outputs the supplemental media stream via the media stream output device such that the output of the main media stream is automatically suspended without user intervention while the supplemental media stream is output.