PicPat allows users to pause and restart on-going, live MBone (vic and vat) transmissions.
Use of PicPat requires the availability of the standard MBone tools.
(vic, vat).
PicPat uses disk buffering on the client machine to accumulate incoming
video and audio streams and to provide the pause facility.
The size of the
disk buffer is user-configurable. PicPat provides the user with a
"pause budget" that limits the total amount of time the video/audio stream
can be paused for the duration of the program. The pause budget may be
expended in "one shot" or in increments over the viewing time. The size
configured for the disk buffer determines the pause budget.
PicPat is partciularly useful in conjunction with the long IETF videos that can be requested through the Interactive Multimedia Jukebox .
Currently, only binaries for Sun Solaris are available. We hope to have ports for other platforms available in the future. Also we are working to expand the functionality of the system to add other modes of interactivity.
This is version 0.1 of PicPat. It is relatively robust but may be a little rough around the edges.
Send comments to Sameer Merchant ( sampav@cc.gatech.edu )or Mostafa Ammar (ammar@cc.gatech.edu).
PicPat is based on ideas published in
K. Almeroth and M. Ammar, "On the Use of Multicast Delivery to Provide a Scalable and Interactive Video-on-Demand Service", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communication, August 1996.
PicPat was written within the Networking and Telecommunications Group of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech by Sameer Merchant with some code borrowed from the MBone VCR and using tcl/tk for the interface (see license information below).
The PicPat system uses Tcl/Tk and MBone VCR native code. Please read the file license.txt included in the distribution for relevant licensing information.
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