Elements of scalable video servers

Large scale multimedia systems combine technologies from audio and video systems, communications systems, and computer systems. In multimedia systems compressed video files are stored digitally on a video server that is typically shared by a large number of users. The two key metrics for a video server are the amount of material that it can store and the number of video streams it can play simultaneously. A video server must be composed of multiple storage units, processing units and network connections in order to store the large amount of digital data and concurrently play the large number of streams. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of video server organizations, compare the alternative systems and show how some of the systems which have been commercially proposed or built fit into the taxonomy.