Described above are methods of authoring multimedia titles and of storing
and delivering multimedia content that implements guaranteed seamless
branching on digital media with high seek latency and a fixed upper bound
on this latency. Continuous media content is arranged as individual clips
on a storage medium. Seamless branches between clips are identified by an
author. A method is disclosed to identify individual clips as carrier
clips or non-carrier clips to guarantee specified seamless behavior while
optimizing bridge memory usage and availability of seamless jumps. Bridge
data of a particular target media clip is interleaved or otherwise
associated on the storage medium with a carrier clip that is upstream of
the target media clip, and delivered along with the upstream media clip.
As bridge data are delivered, they are stored in bridge memory, to be used
to implement a subsequent seamless branch. After the branch is implemented
or after the branch is no longer an option, the bridge data is cleared
from the bridge memory. Additional methods are disclosed for dealing with
intervening file access and for accounting for no-latency branches that
are possible when using some forms of storage devices.