Four-way Video Conference in Home Server for Digital Home

This paper presents a method to provide four-way video conferencing of 640×480 graphics resolution in the home server integrating the functions of high speed communication, digital broadcasting reception, and home automation applications. The home server has been designed to have the functionality of IP, terrestrial and cable STB imbedded so that it possesses a multimedia decoding module as a PCI (peripheral component interconnect) slave device to decode the audio and the vide data compressed in various formats. In addition, we add a special video conference module having audio/video codec, screen divider, and audio mixer. A session manager of application program initiates and controls the additive sessions necessary in the course of participant addition from two-way, three-way to four-way. The session control is based on SIP protocol located in the processing module of the home server. The audio/video streams from each party are decoded in the video conference module. The decoded video streams are displayed on the screen divided spatially. The spatially divided video is encoded in the MPEG encoder of the video conference module and sent to destinations. The audio streams from each party are mixed so that four different mixed streams from the mixer go back to each destination with the spatially divided video. The media decoding module receives the spatially divided video and the mixed audio in formats of ITU-R 656 and I²S respectively fromthe video conference module.