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A distributed approach to multicast multimedia conference recording and playback

Lambrinos, Lambros; (2003) A distributed approach to multicast multimedia conference recording and playback. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London). Green open access

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Abstract

Multimedia conferencing on the MBone, using real-time audio, video and shared workspace tools, is increasingly becoming one of the common ways that people at different locations use to interact with each other. Common applications include teaching, meetings, and event broadcasting. The global deployment of the technology has created the need for a mechanism for the recording and playback of MBone conferences. This thesis investigates the hypothesis that the simple home-VCR model is scaleable to a multi-way multimedia conferencing environment, in terms of user requirements and network considerations, and extensible to the provision of multiple recording locations. I analyse the impact of the MBone infrastructure technologies on recording and playback operations. Important issues include the variety in media types, data security provision and data storage requirements. Of equal importance were the different applications of multimedia conferencing; they had varying requirements from a recording and playback facility. Initial work concentrates on a novel and flexible architecture for a client-server system: the Multicast Multimedia Conference Recorder (MMCR). The MMCR implementation provides users with remote, VCR-style access to a recording and playback service that facilitates efficient random data access using a flexible packet-level indexing mechanism. Using MMCR I investigated the effect of the network on data acquired during recording and potential consequences for playback. I devised an algorithm to reduce the impact of delay variability to improve the quality of playback. Subsequent work focused on a distributed architecture; multiple recording locations are used to diminish packet loss during recording. A software agent is used on sender hosts to assist in data repair; this is achieved using a special data repair protocol that trades the speed of data recovery against bandwidth consumption and agent buffering requirements. The recorders finally combine their data to produce a loss-free recording. The distributed recording work proposed in this thesis can be developed further to focus on dynamic recorder management for more efficient use of resources; this can be achieved using the active networks infrastructure.

Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification: Ph.D
Title: A distributed approach to multicast multimedia conference recording and playback
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language: English
Additional information: Thesis digitised by ProQuest.
Keywords: Communication and the arts; Multimedia conferencing
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10103593
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