MuMiVA: A Multimedia Delivery Platform Using Format-Agnostic, XML-Driven Content Adaptation

Due to the increasing heterogeneity in the current multimedia landscape, the delivery of multimedia content has become an important issue today. This heterogeneity is not only reflected by a plethora of different usage environments, but also by the presence of multiple (scalable) coding formats. Therefore, format-independent adaptation engines have to be used within a multimedia delivery platform, which are able to adapt the multimedia content according to a certain usage environment, independent of the underlying coding format of the content. By relying on automatically created textual descriptions of the high-level syntax of binary media resources, a format-independent adaptation engine can be built. MPEG-21 generic bitstream syntax schema (gBS schema) is a tool that is part of the MPEG-21 multimedia framework. It enables the use of generic bitstream syntax descriptions (gBSDs), i.e., textual descriptions in XML, to steer the adaptation of a binary media resource, using format-independent adaptation logic. In this paper, we address the design and performance evaluation of a multimedia delivery platform that relies on gBS schema-driven adaptation engines. Our platform is called MuMiVA; it is a fully integrated, extensible platform for multimedia delivery in heterogeneous usage environments, using streaming technologies. To demonstrate the flexibility of our multimedia delivery platform, we discuss the functioning of two different applications (i.e., exploitation of temporal scalability and shot selection) applied to two different coding formats (i.e., MPEG-4 visual and H.264/AVC).