Real-time capable file system for scalable media: Algorithms & caching strategy for exploiting scalability on file system level

Professional movie distribution and mastering formats use high quality, intra-frame compression formats like JPEG 2000, a codec allowing for scalability in resolution and quality. Latest processor types, either CPUs or high-end GPUs, can decode digital cinema-compliant JPEG 2000 image sequences in real-time. This brings out a new bottleneck during a movie playback since current consumer hard-drives are not fast enough for data rates being used in digital cinema or digital archiving. This paper shows a method for using file-inherent scalability on file system level as well as a caching strategy especially adapted for scalable media files.