Collaborators:
Kazunori Konishi, APAN-JP, Japan; Shuichi Matsumoto, Masahiro Wada, Shigeyuki Sakazawa, Yasuhiro Takishima, Tetsusi Yamashita; KDD R&D Labs, Japan

Demonstration: International Multilayered Multicast

KDD research and Development Labs has created a demonstration client (a Win32 application) with a simple GUI (video display area and options menus) that allow end users to select among a range of reception modes. In other words, they can chose to receive/decode, as well as start and stop and change different sets of video layers.

To achieve this, a coded video stream is efficiently divided into 6-layer streams at the multicast server. A client terminal can reproduce a video only from the basic layer stream or the multiple streams for a higher picture quality.

Among the application component files are a configuration file, containing all the necessary parameters for receiving the video (i.e the 8 multicast address and port pairs to which the server is forwarding the video layers). A similar configuration file at the server end matches address corresponding parameters in each client configuration. The official minimum system requirement for full-quality reception with the client is, according to the manual, a P2-300MHz with 256MB RAM running Win95 (4.00.950a +), Win98 or WinNT 4.0 SP5.

This demonstration is being conducted with Daniel Forsgren in Sweden, who has added enhancements to this client. (Click here for information on Sweden.)