Patent ID: 7131059

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of scalably presenting a collection of media objects including a video file that contains a sequence of full-motion video frames and an audio sequence synchronized with the video frames, and media objects that are free of any content contained in the video file, the method comprising: selecting from the collection one or more of the media objects that are free of any content contained in the video file based upon one or more relevance criteria relating the selected media objects to one or more of the video frames of the video file; generating a hierarchical sequence of summarization levels each comprising a respective representation of a different respective selection of temporally-ordered content of the video file and associated content of at least one of the selected media objects linked into the respective representation of the temporally-ordered content of the video file, the summarization levels in the hierarchical sequence being ordered in accordance with their different resource requirements, wherein each of the summarization levels above a lowest summarization level in the hierarchical sequence accommodates more resource constraints than a respective immediately preceding one of the summarization levels in the hierarchical sequence; and in response to a request from a client to browse the collection of media objects, selecting one of the generated summarization levels based upon one or more identified resource constraints, and transmitting to the client the respective representation of the respective selection of temporally-ordered content of the video file and the associated content of the at least one of the selected media objects of the selected summarization level.