An open middleware architecture for network-integrated multimedia

Today, we are surrounded by a constantly growing number of networked multimedia devices. These devices offer high-quality input and output capabilities often together with enough computing power and programmability to perform a variety of multimedia operations. However, integrating and controlling these distributed devices from an application is difficult because of the variety of underlying technologies. In this paper we present a network-integrated multimedia middleware especially designed for this heterogeneous environment. Our architecture allows for a flexible usage of different networking technologies and offers the extensibility to transparently use various existing infrastructures. Distributed devices can be discovered, inspected, and then integrated into a common media processing graph. We demonstrate our approach with a distributed camera control application and a multimedia home entertainment center.