A distributed media server for the support of multimedia teaching
Key: LGO+99-1
Author: Michael Liepert, Carsten Griwodz, Giwon On, Michael Zink, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: August 1999
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: SPIE
Book title: Multimedia Systems and Applications II, Boston, MA
Abstract: One major problem of using multimedia material in lecturing is the trade-off between actuality of the content and quality of the presentations. A frequent need for content refreshment exists, but high quality presentations can not be authored by the individual teacher alone at the required rate. Several past and current projects have had the goal of developing so-called learning archives, a variation of digital libraries. On demand, these deliver material with limited structure to students. For lecturing, these systems provide just as insufficient service as the unreliable WWW. Based on our system HyNoDe [HYN97] we address these issues in our distributed media server built of "medianodes". We add content management that addresses teachers' needs and provide guaranteed service for connected as well as disconnected operation of their presentation systems. medianode aims at a scenario for non-real-time, shared creation and modification of presentations and presentation elements. It provides user authentication, administrative roles and authorization mechanisms. It requires an understanding of consistency, versioning and alternative content tailored to lecturing. To allow for predictable presentation quality, medianode provides application level QoS supporting alternative media and alternative presentations. Viable presentation tracks are dynamically generated based on user requests, user profiles and hardware profiles. For machines that are removed from the system according to a schedule, the systems guarantees availability of consistent, complete tracks of selected presentations at disconnect time. In this paper we present the scope of the medianode project and afterwards its architecture, following the realization steps.
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