Virtual file system for scalable media formats: Architecture proposal for managing and handling scalable media files

This document gives an overview about scalable media formats and describes the motivation for special administration strategies. Furthermore, a proposal for a virtual file system architecture will be presented. This architecture allows for granting user rights to certain parts of a scalable file. This feature will be used for administrating scalable media files and allows the generation of different representations of the original source files without transcoding by using file-inherent scalability. The proposed architecture provides mechanisms for the generation and representation of virtual files depending on the user rights stored in an additional database.