A video mail distribution system for networked personal computers

The Computer Networks Laboratory at the University of Virginia has used the Xpress Transfer Protocol (XTP) to construct the Xpress File System (XFS), a local area network peer-to-peer file sharing system for MS-DOS-based IBM personal computers. XFS is usable for a variety of purposes, most notably the real time delivery of multimedia data streams. Using specialized hardware and software it is shown that XFS is capable of maintaining sufficient file system to file system throughput to support the real time delivery of the 30 frames per second audio/video data stream generated by the Fluent system. A general discussion of the architecture and operation of XFS is provided, and an overview of the Fluent system to generate and process motion video data streams is given. The authors describe plans to extend the video mail system into a video conferencing system using XTP.