Patent ID: 7246318

Claim:
In a computing system that is associated with at least one application configured to process multimedia content that includes one or more streams of content from a multimedia source, a method for facilitating the at least one application to process the multimedia content by identifying and providing the application with basic multimedia source and content information, such that the at least one application does not have to be programmed to identify the basic information directly from the multimedia source, the method comprising: an act of accessing multimedia content from the multimedia source to be rendered in a presentation; an act of using multimedia interfaces to identify basic information about the multimedia content and basic information about an intended presentation of the multimedia content; an act of creating a multimedia presentation object, wherein creating the multimedia presentation object includes the following acts: an act of determining multimedia content metadata corresponding to a presentation and that identifies how the multimedia content is formatted; an act of determining a duration for the presentation; and an act of creating an array of stream descriptor objects, wherein the stream descriptor objects include, for each stream in the multimedia content that corresponds to the intended presentation, (a) a unique identifier (b) a start time, (c) a stop time (d) a duration, and (e) all supported media types; upon creating the multimedia presentation object, an act of creating a new presentation event in a queue; an act of providing a multimedia stream interface that is enables applications to select and deselect the descriptor objects through function calls, as well as to select desired play rates for the multimedia content at one or more rendering devices, wherein the multimedia stream interface is further configured to assign time stamps to multimedia content that is determined to not already have assigned time stamps; an act of providing an event manager interface that enables applications to select presentation events through function calls; and upon receiving a function call for the new presentation event from an application, an act of providing the multimedia presentation object to the application, which is used by the application to process the multimedia content.