Patent ID: 7720355

Claim:
A playback apparatus for executing playback of a video stream recorded on a recording medium, comprising: a reading unit operable to read pictures contained in the video stream from the recording medium; a playback unit operable to play back pictures contained in the video stream; and a control unit, wherein the recording medium has playlist information, an entry map, and mark information recorded thereon, the playlist information defines a playback path by indicating a sequence of one or more pairs of a playback start time and a playback end time within the video stream, each pair of a playback start time and a playback end time constitutes a piece of playback section information defining one playback section, the mark information includes an identifier of a piece of playback section information and time information indicating a chapter point in a playback section defined by the corresponding piece of playback section information, the entry map indicates a plurality of entry points in the video stream, in one-to-one correspondence with a plurality of entry times and flags, in response to a request for playback following the playback path, the control unit is operable to (i) specify a nearby entry time to a playback start time of the playback path, from among entry times corresponding to a flag set to ON, and (ii) instruct the reading unit to start reading from an entry point corresponding to the specified entry time; and in response to a request for executing a chapter search function, the control unit is operable to (i) identify the piece of playback section information using the identifier included in the mark information and (ii) instruct the reading unit to read a video stream containing the playback section defined by the identified piece of playback section information, starting from an entry point corresponding to a nearby entry time to the chapter point indicated by the time information included in the mark information.