Showing papers by "Marco Furini published in 2005"

Bringing multimedia contents into MP3 files

Abstract: The digital music revolution has improved the availability of music and made it easier to enjoy. The shift from hard support, such as audio CDs, to software leaves some unsatisfied by the loss of additional media contents, such as images, lyrics, and CD cover. We propose to fill the gap by enriching e-music with multimedia contents. Our proposal focuses specifically on MP3 as a widely distributed open format. The challenge we meet in enriching MP3 lies in maintaining audio compatibility and avoiding file size explosion. To this end, we define a description language to express multimedia contents in a textual way, with higher representation efficiency than existing languages. We also address security issues that arise from the use of an open format. Effectiveness is shown with an MP3 player capable of rendering multimedia contents.

Multimedia Contents within MP3 Files: From Simple Audio Track to a Media Rich Product.

Abstract: E-music distribution is becoming more and more popular over the Internet and a recent research states that e-music will soon replace audio-CDs. Some complains that simple audio tracks can never compete with a complete product like audio-CDs, which provide audio, but also lyrics, images and CD-covers. In this paper we focus on the MP3 open format and we propose a mechanism to transform a single MP3 file into a media-rich product. Several multimedia contents (for instance lyrics, images, CD-covers, updated information, karaoke service) can be embedded into MP3 files without affecting the current MP3 file structure, so that the MP3 file can still be played out by any MP3 player. The effectiveness of our approach is shown through a developed java MP3 player.

Informing Clients through Multimedia Communications: An Approach to Provide Interactivity

Abstract: One of the key problems in informing clients through multimedia streaming applications over the Internet is to customize the stream of information according to the client’s requests. This is achievable only if client and server can interact along the application lifetime, which is possible only if the communication system supports the rigid timing constraints imposed by these interactive applications on their traffic. In the Internet scenario, these applications are very difficult to support, as the Internet provides a best-effort service to the traffic it carries, which means that the Internet does not make any promises about the end-to-end delay for an individual packet and about the variation of packet delay (network jitter) within a packet stream. These problems are confirmed by several experiments we performed over the Internet, which highlight that interactive applications achieve a quality that is frustrating. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of a novel mechanism to support interactive multimedia streaming applications over the Internet. Our mechanism adapts the multimedia stream transmission to the network conditions, by intentionally and slightly acting on the video QoS. Our mechanism has been validated through several experiments performed over the Internet. Results confirm that the supported interactive applications achieve a satisfactory quality and the user perceives a video quality only slightly affected by the QoS modification introduced by our mechanism.