Design and implementation of a video browsing system for the Internet

Recent advances in multimedia processing technologies, internet-working tec hnologies, and the World Wide Web phenomenon have resulted in a vast creati on and use of digital videos, Due to this reason, an efficient technique to locate and retrieve a desired video from a remote video archive is needed. A trail-and-error approach popularly used in current Web search engines is not applicable for searching for a desired video segment since the techniq ue incurs intolerable delays. In this paper, we present the design and impl ementation of a video browsing system that lets the user view a summary of a selected video and search within the video while being downloaded so that the user can determine the relevance of the video as early as possible. Th e system is inexpensive and scalable, making it suitable for large-scale di stributed systems such as the Internet, The browsing system consists of two major software components: a video server, and a video browser and player called VideoCenter implemented using Microsoft DirectShow multimedia develo pment kit. The implementation of VideoCenter enables us to assess the ease of use of DirectShow as well as its drawbacks in developing multimedia appl ications. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.