Inventors:
Jonathan Walpole - Beaverton OR, US
Charles Krasic - Portland OR, US
International Classification:
G06F015/16
Abstract:
A priority progress media-streaming system provides quality-adaptive transmission of multimedia in a shared heterogeneous network environment, such as the Internet. The system may include a server-side streaming media pipeline that transmits a stream of media packets that encompass a multimedia (e.g., video) presentation. Ones of the media packets correspond to a segment of the multimedia presentation that is transmitted based upon packet priority labeling and is out of time sequence from other media packets corresponding to the segment. A client side streaming media pipeline receives the stream of media packets, orders them in time sequence, and renders the multimedia presentation from the ordered media packets. In addition, a scalable priority progress multicast streaming system of the present invention is capable of delivering high bandwidth data to large numbers of clients. The priority progress multicast streaming system applies the functionality of the (unicast) priority progress media-streaming system described above in the context of a multicast tree of forwarding nodes.