Patent ID: 8539105

Claim:
A system for synchronizing content playback, comprising: two or more content playback apparatus; one or more content sources connected by a network to the two or more content playback apparatus to provide content, the content provided by the one or more content sources being digital multimedia data including audio and video comprising content data, content timing data, and at least one physical layer (PHY) timing flag derived from an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM); wherein the content playback apparatus contains one or more of a long data memory buffer and a look up table controlled by a rendering engine and an application program; wherein the content is rendered responsive to the content timing data, offset by timing data, used to compensate for delays in communication so that rendering of a content data stream is synchronized; and wherein the rendering engine is able to at least one of add and remove time slices of the content and adjust a speed of a local clock in order to maintain synchronization with a system-wide macro clock adjusted by timing information including the PHY timing flag or by a relative drift of the local clock as preserved in PHY historical information about how a transmitter time base drifts.