Design And Implementation Of Streaming Media Middleware, Named StreamingWare

The streaming media,such as video, audio, is a time based media that is transmitted in network by streaming technology. With the development of broad-band network,the application of streaming media is increasing popular,including VOD(video on demand),distance Learning,video conference,and video monitoring system etc.Those applications metioned above are all the combination of distributed technology and multimedia technology. It is natural to associate distributed application with middleware.Imagine such kind of middleware for streaming media: first,it can make it possible that inter-connection and inter-operation among distributed nodes and make the developers focus on application,rather than the details of transmission and control. second,it can provide first-class support for the development of streaming media application,such as capture,process,play.Totally, the middleware can provide a framework for capture,process,transmission,control and play,meanwhile offer the related system service,such as streaming protocol,digital right management,etc.It is just the object of the thesis to design and implement a streaming media middleware named Streaming Ware.In architecture, Streaming Ware has two parts: framework and system services.The frame workjust metioned above,provides a mechanism for capture,process, transmission,control and play.The implementation is to extend DirectShow,the Microsoft's development framework for multimedia, to network.DirectShow is an mature development framework for multimedia in PC.In other words,it provides excellent support for capture,process and play.But it is lack of the mechanism for transmission of media data and control information, and control among distributed components. So the extention is mainly for transmission and control.The actual implementation is to design a network filter named NetFilter.The transmission of media data and control information is through NetFilter. The control among distributed components involves the component technology and RPC(remote procedure call).The component technology is just Microsoft's COM(component object model).The RPC makes reference to the idea of web service and the communication of distributed components is based on XML+socket.The system services can extend many parts,such as Qos in application,DRM, andstreaming protocols etc.In this thesis,I design and implement RTP/RTCP. RTP/RTCP. plays a critical role in streaming media application.RTP offers timestamp and SequenceNumber,which are all important to the frame process in application level,such as frames group,play back.RTCP,however,provides many reports,including the sender report and receiver report that provides feedback information of sent packages,which is necessary to Qos.This is a significative and somewhat creative work. The implementation of StreamingWare is rather simple.It has not industry value by now,but the idea of streaming media middleware ,I think,is very significative.If the mature streaming media middleware appears in the future,the manufacturers of streaming media application software will invest more resources in application itself,ruther than waste resources in repetitious work. Then it is possible to form a reasonable industry chain of streaming media application,as J2EE chain.The thesis is organized as follows.First,I introduce the essential ideas of middleware,the core technologies of streaming media and the standard of multimedia middleware of ITU and ISO.Then,the framework and the main components of DirectShow are described.After that,I sententiously introduce the main idea of StreamingWare.The following two chapters are the design and implementation of framework of StreamingWare and the most important system service-RTP/RTCP. The last is summarization of the thesis.