Patent ID: 7609947

Claim:
A playback apparatus for selectively playing back a plurality of video streams stored on a plurality of recording media, comprising: a plurality of drive devices, each operable to access a different one of the recording media; a selecting unit operable to select one of the video streams in accordance with a user operation or a state of the playback apparatus; a control unit operable to control the drive devices, so that the selected video stream is read from one of the recording media; and a playback unit operable to play the read video stream, wherein one of the recording media is an optical disc, and another of the recording media is a secondary medium used as an additional medium to the optical disc, and when the video stream to be read is switched from the video stream stored on the optional disc to the video stream stored on the secondary medium, the control unit causes an optical pickup of an optical disc drive device to point to an area on the optical disc where the video stream is stored, despite that the video stream stored on the optical disc is not played, wherein the optical pickup is caused to point at a position in the area on the optical disc where the video stream is stored, the position corresponding to a current read position in the digital stream stored on the secondary medium.