The Quasar group at OGI is exploring issues related to feedback based adaptive systems, such as high-level user specification of adaptation requirements, improving the structure of systems by using well-defined feedback components, adaptive scheduling of components, etc.

As a tool for this research, we have developed a streaming video and audio player for Unix platforms. This player performs client-server synchronization, adapts to changes in network bandwidth and latency by changing the frame resolution and frame rate independently, allows switching to the best available network interface, etc.

A lot of multimedia software exists on the Windows NT platform that is not available to us on Unix platforms. We would like to be able to plug various software and hardware decoders (ex. H.263) into our player. We would also like to integrate teleconferencing software, such as Intel's Proshare, with our player.

As a first step we are porting our player to run on Windows NT. This step requires some redesign of the core architecture of the player and many minor (or not so minor) changes to code. We have been looking at the DCOM technology as one way to structure our player. Individual components of the video and audio pipeline become DCOM modules. We think that issues related to feedback can be handled well with DCOM components.

I am looking forward to attending the Windows NT workshop both for its tutorial content and as a means to share ideas and my experience with our initial port of our player to the NT platform.

Ashvin Goel
Oregon Graduate Institute
ashvin@cse.ogi.edu
503 690-1121x7386
https://www.cse.ogi.edu/~ashvin