Existing multimedia streaming technologies offer no specific support for user interaction like jumping to bookmarks in a video, or switching to reverse play. When the users, e.g., jump to a bookmark, the player requests frames for the new presentation point from the server and resumes playing only when the data has arrived. Our solution for this problem is the client prefetching and buffering strategy, MPEG-L/MRP, that ensures that the frames which are needed for a response to a possible user interaction are already in the client's buffer,which leads to quick and smooth reaction to user interactions. In case of variable bandwidth, our MPEG-1 streaming approach selects only a subset of all frames to be fetched from the server and supports a smooth presentation at a reduced frame rate with correct timelines. The technical demonstration shows the interactive streaming of MPEG-videos and illustrates our buffering and prefetching strategy.

Top