User control and dynamic reorganization of multimedia presentations during playout

A methodology to dynamically adjust the multimedia presentations as a result of user interactions during the playout is introduced. A constraint-driven approach is described for the automated assembly, organization and playout of presentations from multimedia databases. To allow interactive user control over the playout of an automatically generated presentation, a set of control buttons are provided. Using these buttons, the user can control and change the flow of the presentation in a variety of ways. Interactive user control during the presentation playout, however, can introduce new delays in the original presentation schedule of multimedia segments and possibly change playout constraints. To account for these delays and changes, strategies to (a) dynamically reorganize the subpresentations into a presentation, (b) replace segments with their compacted clips, and (c) delete segments on the presentation graph are proposed.