This book covers the fundamental issues and advanced techniques that underlie the design of modern, high-performance and large scale Continuous Media (CM) servers on various multi-disk platforms. CM continue to be some of the most demanding data types in many newly emerging applications. Those new applications include digital editing systems, digital libraries, corporate training networks, and entertainment databases (video-on-demand, interactive TV). In order to effectively support CM's large size and real-time-display functions, the design of streaming CM servers has to be quite different from that of traditional file or database systems.

KEY TOPICS: The topics included are designed to teach system designers, multimedia applications engineers and other professionals the optimization techniques necessary to maximize the performance of these complex servers for the diversity inherent in CM applications. To illustrate this concept, the book features an accompanying CD complete with a working example of tutorial CM software to experience running a CM server hands-on.

MARKET: Streaming media, Web server, and video-on-demand designers and programmers will find this book to be extremely relevant and timely. It is also of great help to multimedia application developers and service performance analysts.

Contents

• Fundamentals of streaming media systems
• Single disk platform SM servers
• Multiple disk platform SM servers
• Deadline-driven scheduling & unconstrained data placement
• Heterogeneous disk platform SM servers
• Fault tolerance issues in SM servers
• Hierarchical storage design for SM servers
• Distributed SM servers
• Super-streaming
• Yima case study
• Appendices