Authors:
Maarten Wijnants
;
Peter Quax
and
Wim Lamotte
Affiliation:
Hasselt University -- tUL -- iMinds, Belgium
Keyword(s):
Multimedia, Inter-Destination Media Synchronization (IDMS), Group Synchronization, Cost-benefit Analysis, synchronous MediaSharing (sMS).
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Distributed and Parallel Applications
;
Internet Technology
;
Mobile Information Systems
;
Mobile Media Sharing Systems
;
Multimedia and User Interfaces
;
Protocols and Standards
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Interfaces and Applications
;
Web Programming
Abstract:
A multitude of application domains benefit from synchronized multimedia content presentation and playback across spatially scattered client stations. Online remote tutoring, telework and teleconferencing, and the non-co-located synchronous browsing through a digital photo album are merely some examples of potential use cases, which are referred to collectively as real-time distributed groupware. This paper presents five concrete schemes that realize media synchronization over the Web. The proposed techniques have been implemented and experimentally validated as part of the synchronous MediaSharing (sMS) service, a framework which grants geographically dispersed users the ability to share and synchronously consume digital pictures and video clips. All five schemes are completely Web-compliant, achieve relatively loose synchronization accuracy, and can be categorized as being non-distributed in the sense that they require centralized coordination. Besides being technically compared, th
e synchronization solutions are subjected to a high-level assessment in terms of their infrastructural requirements and the thereby associated necessary operational expenditure.
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