Unit 5

Using Media and

Streaming
 Understanding the
Streaming Process
Streaming Media Means?
 Streaming media is video or audio content sent in
compressed form over the Internet and played
immediately, rather than being saved to the hard
drive.
With streaming media, a user does not have to
wait to download a file to play it. Because the
media is sent in a continuous stream of data it can
play as it arrives.
With streaming media, a user does not have to
wait to download a file to play it. Because the
media is sent in a continuous stream of data it can
play as it arrives.
 Advantages of streaming
media
Makes it possible for users to take advantage of
interactive applications like video search and
personalized playlists.
Allows content deliverers to monitor what visitors
are watching and how long they are watching it.
Allows content deliverers to monitor what visitors
are watching and how long they are watching it.
Provides the content creator with more control over
his intellectual property because the video file is not
stored on the viewer's computer. Once the video
data is played, it is discarded by the media player.
 live or on-demand ?

Streamed material can be live or on-

demand.
 live or on-demand
Live streaming is called progressive streaming or
progressive download,

while on-demand streaming is from material that

is already stored to disk. In a live broadcast, the
video signal is converted into a compressed
digital signal and transmitted from a Web server
asmulticast, sending a single file to multiple
users at the same time.
 Streaming media is transmitted by a server
application and received and displayed in real-
time by a client application called a media player.
A media player can be either an integral part of a
browser, a plug-in, a separate program, or a
dedicated device, such as an iPod.
Frequently, video files come with embedded
players. YouTube videos, for example, run in
embeddedFlashplayers.
Live streaming
On-demand streaming
 Protocol in use

How to Decide Which

Protocol ?
 Protocol Deciding
A digital audio or video file is partitioned into
many small pieces and played back at high
speed.
Depending upon the nature of the material,
playing streamed material can suffer a certain
amount of loss of transmitted packets, which is
displayed as dropped frames or missing notes
without the viewer noticing.
This difference between streamed media and
transferred media is fundamental in deciding
which transfer protocol to use.
 TCP or UDP ?

For transferred media, the entire file must be transmitted

with fidelity, thus TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the
transmission protocol.
In a streamed media scenario, fidelity isn't a prerequisite,
thus UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is the transmission
protocol.
Cloud computing in media
Streaming
 Cloud computing
advantages(1)
1. Access to large scale storage, which enable the storage
of large media files and on-demand media libraries.
Example:-
Amazon S3, Microsoft Windows Azure Blob Storage,
Nirvanix, EMC Atmos Online, Mezo, Google Storage for
Developers. Rackspace CloudFiles, and Eucalyptus are
examples of some of the large cloud storage systems
available to content providers.
Some of these systems, such as Microsoft Azure and
Google Storage, support the applications developers'
position on those SaaS services.
 Cloud computing
advantages(2)
2.Access to scalable compute engines and
network storage that can serve as the
streaming server to large audiences.

.
 Cloud computing
advantages(3)
Access to a scalable compute engines that can be useful when you want
to perform encoding/decoding or transcoding on media files.

Example:-
The company Encoding.com is an example of a transcoding service where
you can use an Adobe AIR application to drag and drop files that are
encoded right to your desktop.
Ex. AVI to WMV encoding ,
 Cloud computing
advantages(4)
Access to content delivery networks or edge
systems that can push content out to users based
on geographical location.
 Audio streaming
Audio streaming is the practice of delivering real-time
audio through a network connection.
In general, audio streaming utilizes a buffering system
and a secure data stream platform to allow end users
to listen to full audio files without interruption.
This type of data streaming also requires significant
bandwidth. Experts point out that high-quality audio
streaming is a somewhat recent phenomenon, and
that in previous decades, a lot of major types of
connections such as dial-up Internet or slower
bandwidth offers would not accommodate
uninterrupted audio streaming.
 Audio streaming
Audio streaming makes much lower demands on network
bandwidth than video streaming does. An audio file is roughly
500 times smaller than a correspondingly long video file.
Therefore, the first streaming services that appeared even
before broadband became widely available were audio
streaming services.
An early entrant into this area was Real Networks' Real Player
technology and its associated protocol suite. There was a time
when many content providers required you to use RealAudio
technology and the RealPlayer media player.
Two other competing formats appeared that have gotten
general acceptance: Windows Media Player and Apple
QuickTime. These players play video formats as well as audio
formats, and all are available as stand-alone players or as
browser plug-ins.
But trend has been shifted from proprietary formats to
standard formats. Today MP3 is King.
Audio streaming
 RTP
RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol)
The aim of RTP is to provide a uniform means of
transmitting data subject to real time constraints over
IP (audio, video, etc.).
More generally, RTP makes it possible to:
identify the type of information carried,
add temporary markers and sequence numbers to the
information carried,
monitor the packets' arrival at the destination.
In addition, RTP may be conveyed by multicast packets
in order to route conversations to multiple recipients.
 RTP typically runs overUser Datagram Protocol(UDP).
RTP is used in conjunction with theRTP Control
Protocol(RTCP).
While RTP carries the media streams (e.g., audio and
video), RTCP is used to monitor transmission statistics
andquality of service(QoS) and aids synchronization
of multiple streams.
RTP is one of the technical foundations ofVoice over
IPand in this context is often used in conjunction with
asignaling protocolsuch as theSession Initiation
Protocol(SIP) which establishes connections across
the network
 RTCP & RTSP
RTCP (Real-time Transport Control Protocol)
RTCP protocol is based on periodic transmissions of
control packets by all participants in the session.
It is a control protocol for RTP flow, making it possible
to convey basic information on the participants of a
session and the quality of service.
The Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is a network
control protocol designed for use in entertainment
and communications systems to control streaming
media servers. The protocol is used for establishing
and controlling media sessions between end points.
 VOIP
VOIP is an acronym for Voice Over Internet
Protocol, or in more common terms phone service
over the Internet.
If you have a reasonable quality Internet
connection you can get phone service delivered
through your Internet connection instead of from
your local phone company.
 Working with VOIP
applications
Voice over IP or VoIP is a set of communication protocols for delivering
voice over the Internet.
Some of these services have been migrated to the cloud, particularly
those services that require the involvement of large number of
servers.
VoIP uses additional protocols and standards other than audio
streaming; these are the most commonly used VoIP standards:
H.323
IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)
Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP)
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP)
Session Description Protocol (SDP)
Examples:-
Skype
Google voice and Google talk
 Why use VOIP?
Lower Cost- In general phone service via VOIP
costs less than equivalent service from traditional
sources. This is largely a function of traditional
phone services either being monopolies or
government entities. There are also some cost
savings due to using a single network to carry
voice and data. This is especially true when users
have existing under-utilized network capacity that
they can use for VOIP without any additional
costs.
Increased Functionality- It is portable than
traditional landlines generating huge bills.
 Video Streaming
Video streaming over the Internet has
become one of the major broadcast
transmission media in a rather short time.
Many trends have come together to help
make this transition a reality, including
broadband networks, high-capacity
commodity disk drives, low-cost computing
power, and now cloud computing.
Video streaming is one of these
technologies that benefits greatly from
deployment in the cloud.
Example:- YouTube
 Television in cloud
Television is a very important industry. The
average American watches five hours of TV a
day, and $70 billion a year is spent on
advertising.
The number of TV watchers dwarfs the 1 billion
PC users, and even the 2 billion cell phone
users. Worldwide, there are 4 billion TV
watchers.
Many TV stations have begin to put their series
episodes and movies on internet sites such as
ABC.com, StarhotSpot, AppleTV, GoogleTV etc.
 Streaming video formats
Firefox 4 (WebM)
Chrome (h.264 supported now, WebM enabled
version available via Early Release Channel)
Opera 10.6+ (WebM)
Apple Safari (h.264, version 4+)
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (h.264, Platform
Preview 3)
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8 with
Google Chrome Frame installed
You should expect HTML5 to be standard in the
official release versions of these browsers before
2010
ends.
 You also can view HTML 5 content in the following media
players:
Media Player Classic (http://mpc-hc.sourceforge net/)
Moovida Core (http://www moovida.com/)
VLC (http://www.videolan.org/)
Winamp (http://www.winamp.com/media-player/)
XBMC (http://xbmc.org/)
Video formats are only half of the story when it comes to
video file formats. The second half of the story is the format
for the streaming protocol that encodes the video file. Several
of these container formats are in use.

The most widely used streaming video file container format is

H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10.
MPEG-4 Part 10 is also known as MPEG-4 AVC, which stands for
Advanced Video Coding.