Multimedia Presentation and Transmission Standards and Their Support for Automatic Analysis, Conversion and Scaling: A Survey

摘要

The increasing popularity of WWW-based services, the rapidly increasing penetration of smart phones and PDAs, and the effect of emerging technologies such as WAP, has awakened the service provider and content producer community to the need for providing lightweight versions of their applications. Another recent trend has been user-adaptive services, which most of the popular search engines already provide through customizable front ends as well as a wide range of audio and multimedia search facilities. Services that facilitate streaming media are gaining popularity but are creating even more stress on the overloaded Internet. High-speed subscriber lines, however, would give the user the necessary bandwidth to use multimedia in its most complex form. The adaptation of services- vices to meet users' settings is usually done without considering media or transmission thus requiring the user to be aware of many technical details and creating a constant need for them to upgrade their hardware and software. In this survey, we study the most common representation standards and protocols used to deliver multimedia over the public Internet and demonstrate how the information we extract from them can be used in automatic, media-wise adaptation of multimedia to improve the quality of service. We conclude with a comprehensive application example that demonstrates how standard multimedia and transmission protocols can be utilized in application-independent adaptation of multimedia.