XMovie: Architecture and Implementation of a Distributed Movie System

Abstract

We describe a system for storing, transmitting and presenting digital movies in a computer network. The hardware used in the system is standard hardware, as found in typical workstations today; no special hardware is required. The movies are shown in windows of the X window system. This allows full integration with the classical components of computer applications such as text, color graphics, menus and icons. The XMovie system has several innovative features: First, it contains a new algorithm for the gradual adaptation of the color lookup table during the presentation of the movie to ensure optimal color quality on low-end workstations. Second, it is a multi-standard system supporting the compression techniques MPEG, H.261, Motion JPEG, and a newly developed extension to the well known Color Cell Compression method. Third, we introduce AdFEC, a new adaptable forward error correction method for our movie transmission protocol