Patent ID: 8045844

Claim:
A playback device for playing back video images from a recording medium having recorded thereon: a main-view stream used for monoscopic video playback; and a sub-view stream used for stereoscopic video playback in combination with the main-view stream, wherein the sub-view stream is encoded with reference to the main-view stream, the main-view stream is divided into a plurality of main-view data blocks, the sub-view stream is divided into a plurality of sub-view data blocks, the main-view data blocks and the sub-view data blocks are successively recorded in an interleaved arrangement, and constitute a plurality of extent blocks, each of the extent blocks is referred to during stereoscopic video playback as a single extent, a top data block in each of the extent blocks is a sub-view data block, the playback device comprises: a reading unit operable to read the extent blocks from the recording medium; a switching unit operable to extract the main-view stream and the sub-view stream from the extent blocks read by the reading unit; a first read buffer operable to store therein the main-view stream extracted by the switching unit; a second read buffer operable to store therein the sub-view stream extracted by the switching unit; and a decoding unit operable to read and decode the main-view stream from the first read buffer, and read and decode the sub-view stream from the second read buffer, and a time (t) required for the decoding unit to decode all data blocks in one extent block is greater than or equal to a sum (t 1 +t 2 +t 3 ) of a time (t 1 ) required for the reading unit to read the data blocks except for a top data block in the extent block, a time (t 2 ) required for the reading unit to start to read a top of a next extent block from a time of finishing reading a tail of the extent block, and a time (t 3 ) required for the reading unit to read the top data block in the next extent block.