A distributed video retrieval system utilising broadband networked PC's for educational applications

Conventional educational material is ever more complemented with computer based multimedia material. In order to make this material available to teachers and students in a structured manner, we developed a multimedia database and accompanying tools for creating, manipulating and formatting the teaching content (K. Coninx et al., 1997). Recently, we expanded this educational multimedia database with the functionality to support streamed video as well. Given the vast amounts of data that needs to be stored and transmitted when dealing with streamed video retrieval, we opted to realise a distributed video server. Physically, the distributed server consists of a set of Windows NT PCs, which are interconnected utilising a broadband ATM network. The paper reports on the main implementation aspects of the system.