Patent ID: 7877000

Claim:
A system control apparatus for controlling a drive mechanism for an optical disc to read out a video title from the optical disc and performing controls to output an AV stream contained in the read-out video title to a decoder unit so that the decoder unit outputs the AV stream for a reproduction, the system control apparatus comprising: a read controlling unit operable to perform a control such that after the optical disc is installed in the drive mechanism, data is read out from a manager area of the optical disc and is stored in a manager buffer; a judging unit operable to, if an operator selects a video title to be reproduced, refer to a piece of playback type information that corresponds to the selected video title, among a plurality of pieces of playback type information contained in the data read out from the manager area and stored in the manager buffer, and judge whether AV functioning can be executed when the selected video title is reproduced; and an AV functioning executing unit operable, only when the judging unit judges that the AV functioning can be executed, to start executing the AV functioning when the AV stream starts to be output for a reproduction, wherein the video title includes one or more AV streams and one or more pieces of route information each of which is information that represents a video title by defining a reproduction route for one or more AV streams, each piece of playback type information includes a first flag and a second flag, the first flag indicating whether a corresponding video title is represented by only one piece of route information or by a plurality of pieces of route information, and the second flag indicating whether the route information of the corresponding video title includes branch information, and the judging unit judges that the AV functioning can be executed either in a first case where the first flag indicates that the corresponding video title is represented by only one piece of route information, or in a second case where the second flag indicates that the route information of the corresponding video title does not include the branch information.