User interface for displaying and playing multimedia contents, apparatus comprising the same, and control method thereof

This application claims the benefit of Korean Application No. 2007-117095, filed Nov. 16, 2007, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.

1. Field of the Invention

Aspects of the present invention relate to an apparatus for displaying and playing multimedia contents, and, more particularly, to a user interface for displaying and playing the multimedia contents, which is capable of allowing the user to easily recognize information about multimedia contents at a glance, and allowing the user to more easily retrieve desired information, through an image pre-play function, an apparatus comprising the same, and a control method thereof.

2. Description of the Related Art

In accordance with recent developments in the field of image and audio media, a recording medium capable of recording and storing a large amount of high-quality image data or high-quality audio data corresponding to a long playback time has been developed and are commercially available. Such a recording medium includes an optical disc, such as, a digital versatile disc (DVD), for example.

Also, an optical disc system capable of recording multimedia contents on an optical disc and playing the recorded multimedia contents has been developed and are commercially available. Such multimedia contents include images and audio, for example, and such an optical disc system includes a digital versatile disc (DVD) recorder, for example.

Such a DVD recorder plays back images and/or audio recorded on a DVD, and outputs the images and/or audio through a screen and/or a speaker. For multimedia contents consisting of moving images, the DVD recorder uses a coding compression algorithm proposed by the moving picture expert group (MPEG) to encode and record the multimedia contents. For the playback of the recorded multimedia contents, the DVD recorder decodes the encoded multimedia contents to reproduce original multimedia contents.

Personal video recorders (PVRs) have also been developed and are commercially available. Since such PVRs store a broadcast signal transmitted from a broadcasting station in a hard disk drive (HDD) or a storage medium other than the HDD in the form of a digital signal, it provides an environment enabling the user not only to view a broadcast of the broadcast signal in real time, but also to play back a stored broadcast signal every time the user wants to view a stored broadcast of the broadcast signal.

In typical cases, however, retrieval of a desired multimedia content can be achieved only after the user opens storage areas, namely, folders, in which the multimedia contents are stored one by one, because the multimedia contents are arranged in a form of a list.

In the typical multimedia content retrieval method, a number of operations performed to retrieve a desired multimedia content from the folder in which multimedia contents are stored increases as a depth (or a number of subfolders) of the folder increases. In order to retrieve a desired one of the multimedia contents, the user should search the multimedia contents stored in the subfolders one by one.

In the typical multimedia content retrieval method, in which listed multimedia contents are searched individually to retrieve a desired multimedia content, the searching operation is carried out only based on titles of the multimedia contents. In order to obtain detailed information about a certain multimedia content, it is necessary to actually play back the multimedia content. For this reason, it is inconvenient when the played-back multimedia content does not correspond to a multimedia content desired by the user, since search and retrieval operations would need to be repeated, possibly multiple times, to retrieve the desired multimedia content.

Furthermore, the recent increase in the capacities of the DVDs and the PVRs, and the recent continuous increase in the number of available multimedia contents have resulted in increased difficulty in searching an enormous amount of the multimedia contents.

Aspects of the present invention has been made in view of the above-mentioned problems, and an aspect of the invention include a user interface for displaying and playing multimedia contents, which is capable of allowing the user to easily recognize information about multimedia contents at a glance, and allowing the user to more easily retrieve desired information, through an image pre-play function, an apparatus comprising the same, and a control method thereof.

In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, a method of displaying and playing multimedia contents includes displaying a sorting item of a multimedia content; and arranging file information of the multimedia content based on the sorting item, the file information having a form of a playable image and having a pre-play function.

According to an aspect of the present invention, the method may further include displaying the file information in an activated state when the file information is selected using the sorting item.

According to an aspect of the present invention, the displaying of the sorting item of the multimedia content may include: displaying a main item of the multimedia content; displaying an upper-level item as a sub-item of the main item when the main item is selected; and displaying a lower-level item as a sub-item of the upper-level item when the upper-level item is selected.

According to an aspect of the present invention, the displaying of the file information in the activated state may include: further displaying an indicator to indicate a position of the activated file information relative to the other file information.

According to an aspect of the present invention, the arranging of the file information may include: further displaying a moving bar to move a position of the arranged file information relative to the other file information.

According to an aspect of the present invention, the file information may be arranged in the form of a playable thumbnail.

In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, a method for displaying and playing multimedia contents includes displaying a sorting item of a multimedia content; arranging file information of the multimedia content based on the sorting item, the file information having a form of a playable image and having a pre-play function; and pre-playing a file corresponding to the file information when the file information is selected, wherein the pre-playing of the file includes stopping the pre-play of the file when a file stop command for the file is input, and resuming the pre-play of the file, resuming from a stop point at which the pre-play of the file was stopped, when a file return command is input.