Streaming multimedia over the Internet

Media streaming has emerged as an important service offered over the Internet. In response, the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 multimedia standard has been introduced. It encompasses a wide range of tools and technologies for delivering multimedia content. The MPEG-4 standard does not focus only on media compression, it also considers the media packaging and delivery components. One of the most interesting features MPEG-4 is that it is an object-based multimedia technology. An MPEG-4 presentation is comprised of units of aural, visual or audiovisual content, called media objects. Data access in MPEG-4 is always viewed as delivering, storing or accessing elementary streams. MPEG-4 has dedicated a part of the standard to delivery issues by defining a generic platform for the delivery of multimedia information. This platform is called the delivery multimedia integration framework (DMIF). The article gives an overview of DMIF, and describes its communication architecture and the DMIF default signaling protocol (DDSP). The authors also describe their contribution to producing Implementation 1 (IM1), the reference software for MPEG-4. They have contributed the DMIF remote retrieval instance and also an MPEG-4 streaming server that fully supports DMIF.