1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to playback systems, apparatuses, and methods, information processing apparatuses and methods, and programs therefor, and in particular, to a playback system, apparatus, and method, an information processing apparatus and method, and a program therefor for enhancing the usability of, for example, a content player.
2. Description of the Related Art
Players for playing back content such as moving images (including images and, if necessary, sounds accompanying the images), still images, sounds (including pieces of music or the like) include, for example, tape recorders (players) and disk recorders (players).
In addition to playing back content at a single speed in real time, such players can play back content in other special manners including, for example, high-speed playback such as double-speed playback (fast-forward), low-speed playback such as frame-by-frame advance and slow playback, pause (playback), and rewind.
For example, when a user wants to view desired content, the user can search for the desired content by high-speed playback. When there is a particular portion in the desired content that the user wants to view, the user can find this portion also by high-speed playback.
As recording media, such as hard disks (HDs), have recently significantly grown in capacity and dropped in price, disk recorders with large-capacity HDs have become widely used.
Such disk recorders with large-capacity HDs can record many pieces of content. Even with the high-speed playback described above, it is necessary for the user to make efforts to find a desired piece of content or a desired portion of a certain piece of content from among many pieces of content.
For example, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication 2005-65185, a ticker section including a ticker and a speaker's voice section including a speaker's voice are detected from content. The speaker's voice section and an overlapping section between the ticker section and the speaker's voice section are determined as a playback section for playing back the content, and this playback section is played back to perform digest playback.
Special playback performed by known players is playback performed at various speeds, such as high-speed playback and low-speed playback, and has no relationship with the details of content.
If it is possible to perform special playback according to the details of content, that is, if it is possible to perform playback in which data to be played back is determined (changed) according to the details of content, this is highly convenient.
Special playback according to the playback speed, such as high-speed playback and low-speed playback, is referred to as simple and special playback as necessary. Also, special playback according to the details of content is referred to as exceptional and special playback.
Such exceptional and special playback includes, for example, playback for playing back a portion of the specific details of content, such as abstract playback for playing back only scenes that help the user understand the outline of the entire content and highlight playback for playing back only highlight scenes of the content. With various types of exceptional and special playback including abstract playback and highlight playback, the usability of the player can be enhanced.