Patent ID: 8341688

Claim:
A system for retrieving fragments of a temporally-ordered media presentation data stream, the system comprising: a buffer in which received fragments are stored, wherein the fragments were formed by dividing the temporally-ordered data stream into a sequence of segments and further dividing the segments into fragments, a fragment has a length which is a function of the fragment's location within the data stream, a nominal transmission time was assigned to each of the fragments within a segment, wherein the nominal transmission time for the fragment is based on a time interval, and wherein the time interval is a function of the length of the segment and the number of fragments in the segment, the fragments were sorted into an order in accordance with nominal transmission times, and the fragments were transmitted in the order at a fixed data rate, wherein the fixed data rate is based on a harmonic mean of the time intervals for the segments, and wherein a time between transmission of each of the fragments is equal to the harmonic mean of the time intervals for the segments; an assembly circuit for retrieving stored fragments from the buffer and presenting the fragments to a playback device in a temporal order; and a gate circuit which receives fragments and selectively forwards the fragments to the buffer or to the assembly circuit in accordance with a temporal location of a received fragment relative to fragments to be presented to the playback device.