Interactive MPEG-4 videos: An impress extension for MPEG-4 conversion and a streaming architecture for e-learning

MPEG-4 gives the opportunity to describe the scenes of a motion picture directly through XMT-A and XMT-O: two ldquohigh level languagesrdquo that are XML based. Moreover MPEG-4 allows (and defines) the opportunities for video streaming. This makes this standard appealing for the conversion of Impress or PowerPoint presentations and also for other e-learning applications because it offers the possibility of publishing the converted presentations on streaming servers (as for example the Darwin server). In this paper we exploit those possibilities by implementing an Impress extension that translates an electronic presentation to XMT-O, so to be finally ldquocompiledrdquo for MPEG-4 conversion, and a streaming architecture for e-learning.