The Argonne Voyager multimedia server

Abstract

With the growing presence of multimedia-enabled systems, we will see an integration of collaborative computing concepts into future scientific and technical workplaces. Desktop teleconferencing is common today, while more complex teleconferencing technology that relies on the availability of multipoint-enabled tools is starting to become available on PCs. A critical problem when using these collaborative tools is archiving multistream, multipoint meetings and making the content available to others. Ideally, one would like the ability to capture, record, play back, index, annotate, and distribute multimedia stream data as easily as we currently handle text or still-image data. The Argonne Voyager project is exploring and developing media server technology needed to provide such a flexible, virtual multipoint recording/playback capability. In this article we describe the motivating requirements, architecture, implementation, operation, performance, and related work.