Patent ID: 7925771

Claim:
A method of presenting streaming media data received from a remote data processing apparatus via a communications network, the method comprising: presenting at least a portion of the streaming media data that is received via the communications network; detecting an interruption to receiving the streaming media data, the interruption causing the reception to terminate; reconnecting to the remote data processing apparatus via the communications network after detecting the interruption; and presenting, without visible or audible interruption of the presentation of the at least the portion, the remainder of the streaming media data; wherein the streaming media data comprises a plurality of discrete packets of media data that are presented in succession, each of the packets has an associated time marker that defines when said packet is to be presented relative to other packets from the data, and wherein each of the packets has an associated track, such that all packets associated with a particular track can be presented without regard to any packet associated with any other track; and wherein reconnecting comprises providing time marker information for a plurality of packets received prior to the detected interruption, determining a largest time gap between successive data packets whose time markers are provided, selecting, for each track in the data, a time marker of the most current received packet out of those time markers provided, determining, out of the selected time markers, which is the earliest, selecting a time to resume presentation by subtracting the value of the largest time gap from the earliest of the selected time markers, and requesting new streaming media data to start from the selected time.