University of Babylon

College of Information Technology

Lecture 1
Multimedia Networking Applications

1 Introduction
We define a multimedia network application as any network application that employs audio or
video. Before continuing in this subject, it is important to consider the essential characteristics of
the audio and video media themselves.

2 Properties of Video
Perhaps the most important characteristic of video is its high bit rate. Video distributed over
the Internet typically ranges from 100 kbps for low-quality video conferencing to over 3 Mbps
for streaming high-definition movies. To get a sense of how video bandwidth demands compare
with those of other Internet applications, let’s briefly consider three different users, each using a
different Internet application. Our first user, Frank, is going quickly through photos posted on his
friend’s Facebook pages. Let’s assume that Frank is looking at a new photo every 10 seconds, and
that photos are on average 200 Kbytes in size. (As usual, throughout this discussion we make the
simplifying assumption that 1 Kbyte = 8,000 bits.) Our second user, Martha, is streaming music
from the Internet (”the cloud”) to her smartphone. Let’s assume Martha is using a service such as
Spotify to listen to many MP3 songs, one after the other, each encoded at a rate of 128 kbps. Our
third user, Victor, is watching a video that has been encoded at 2 Mbps. Finally, let’s suppose
that the session length for all three users is 4,000 seconds (approximately 67 minutes). Table 1
compares the bit rates and the total bytes transferred for these three users. We see that video
streaming consumes by far the most bandwidth, having a bit rate of more than ten times greater
than that of the Facebook and music-streaming applications. Therefore, when designing networked
video applications, the first thing we must keep in mind is the high bit-rate requirements of video.

Table 1: Comparison of bit-rate requirements of three Internet applications

Another important characteristic of video is that it can be compressed, thereby trading off video
quality with bit rate. A video is a sequence of images, typically being displayed at a constant rate,
for example, at 24 or 30 images per second. An uncompressed, digitally encoded image consists of
an array of pixels, with each pixel encoded into a number of bits to represent luminance and color.
There are two types of redundancy in video, both of which can be exploited by video compression.
Spatial redundancy is the redundancy within a given image. Intuitively, an image that consists
of mostly white space has a high degree of redundancy and can be efficiently compressed without
significantly sacrificing image quality. Temporal redundancy reflects repetition from image to
subsequent image. If, for example, an image and the subsequent image are exactly the same,
there is no reason to re-encode the subsequent image; it is instead more efficient simply to indicate

1
during encoding that the subsequent image is exactly the same. Today’s off-the-shelf compression
algorithms can compress a video to essentially any bit rate desired. Of course, the higher the bit
rate, the better the image quality and the better the overall user viewing experience. We can also
use compression to create multiple versions of the same video, each at a different quality level. For
example, we can use compression to create, say, three versions of the same video, at rates of 300
kbps, 1 Mbps, and 3 Mbps. Users can then decide which version they want to watch as a function
of their current available bandwidth. Users with high-speed Internet connections might choose the
3 Mbps version; users watching the video over 3G with a smartphone might choose the 300 kbps
version. Similarly, the video in a video conference application can be compressed ”on-the-fly” to
provide the best video quality given the available end-to-end bandwidth between conversing users.

3 Properties of Audio
Digital audio (including digitized speech and music) has significantly lower bandwidth requirements
than video. Digital audio, however, has its own unique properties that must be considered when
designing multimedia network applications. To understand these properties, let’s first consider how
analog audio (which humans and musical instruments generate) is converted to a digital signal:

• The analog audio signal is sampled at some fixed rate, for example, at 8,000 samples per
second. The value of each sample will be some real number.
• Each of the samples is then rounded to one of a finite number of values. This operation is
referred to as quantization. The number of such finite values—called quantization values—is
typically a power of two, for example, 256 quantization values.
• Each of the quantization values is represented by a fixed number of bits. For example, if there
are 256 quantization values, then each value—and hence each audio sample—is represented
by one byte. The bit representations of all the samples are then concatenated together to form
the digital representation of the signal. As an example, if an analog audio signal is sampled
at 8,000 samples per second and each sample is quantized and represented by 8 bits, then
the resulting digital signal will have a rate of 64,000 bits per second. For playback through
audio speakers, the digital signal can then be converted back—that is, decoded—to an analog
signal. However, the decoded analog signal is only an approximation of the original signal,
and the sound quality may be noticeably degraded (for example, high-frequency sounds may
be missing in the decoded signal). By increasing the sampling rate and the number of
quantization values, the decoded signal can better approximate the original analog signal.
Thus (as with video), there is a trade-off between the quality of the decoded signal and the
bit-rate and storage requirements of the digital signal.

The basic encoding technique that we just described is called pulse code modulation (PCM). Speech
encoding often uses PCM, with a sampling rate of 8,000 samples per second and 8 bits per sample,
resulting in a rate of 64 kbps.