An interoperable delivery framework for scalable media resources

In this article an interoperable framework for the delivery of scalable media resources (e.g., in the standardized scalable video coding format) is presented. The framework provides support for video on demand as well as multicast streaming, and performs efficient, generic, and interoperable adaptation of streamed content based on MPEG- 21 Digital Item Adaptation. The server as well as the clients of the streaming framework implement the MPEG Extensible Middleware and utilize the MPEG Query Format for querying the available media resources. The framework has been fully integrated into the VLC media player. The architecture for both VoD and multicast is presented in detail. Finally, a comparison in terms of performance of the generic MPEG-21 metadata-based adaptation approach to an SVC-specific adaptation approach is provided.