Introduction
The previous versions of Access Grid toolkit (AGTk) 2.x have just provided H.261 codec-based video with VIC, which is one of MBone tool and supports CIF size video. But it is not enough to provide wide and detail video, so that it is impossible to adopt AGTk to make practically use of remote medical serivces, distributed lecture, and e-science visualization. In order to make up this point, we have presented high-quality video service for AG.
This is a pilot version of high-quality video service for Access Grid (AG). We have implemented the unified video interface to link versatile video tools based on high-quality video codec with AG. In this products, Video LAN client (VLC) and DVTS (Digital Video Transport System) is used for high-quality video delivery: VLC provides 19.2Mbps MPEG-2TS-encoded 1280x720 30progressive and DVTS provides 30Mbps 720x480 DV encoding. Various video codecs are available over AG using the unified video interface, it is possible for you to experiment HDV and DV on collaboration environment.
Features
- Unified Video Interface
- This component enables AG operators to add new video tools to AGTk. Therefore, various video tools such as DVTS, VLC, and other tools are available if these tools supports real-time multicast streaming.
- Flexible Multicast Address Allocation
- To deliver various kinds of video streams, it is essential to inform AG nodes on receiver side of meta data for video stream. For this, we modified venue server to allocate two types of multicast, and those are used for meta-data announcement and video delivery, respectivly.
- Extended Video {Producer, Consumer} Services
- These are new services for Venue Client and in charge of meta-data announcement and video tools management. To announce video meta information, we used Session Announcement Protocol (SAP) and modified UCL-multimedia common library for this.