Generic Adaptation of Scalable Multimedia Resources: Interoperable Device and Coding Format Independent Multimedia Communication for Universal Access

Over the last decade, a wide spectrum of multimedia resource formats has become available to an increasing number of users who desire to access it through various devices and over heterogeneous networks. This book describes means for device and coding format independent access to advanced multimedia resources in an interoperable way. That is, it addresses issues as indicated in the scenario above which are generally referred to as Universal Multimedia Access (UMA). In particular, it proposes a generic XML-based multimedia publishing framework which allows the adaptation of advanced multimedia resources in a coding format independent way. XML is used to describe the high-level structure of the multimedia resources which enables the adaptation thereof using standardized processes. The XML document describing the structure of the multimedia resource is transformed using traditional XML transformation languages and a generic processor generates the adapted multimedia resource by means of the transformed XML document. The metadata overhead is reduced by using an appropriate encoding scheme (MPEG BiM) for which an API is proposed enabling the adoption into network-enabled devices.