Multimedia transmissions and collaborative environment

The Multimedia transmissions and collaborative environment activity is an application oriented activity building a middleware layer on top of the high throughput optical networks. This layer supports multimedia content sharing and related end user communication. It contains multimedia transfers with a signaling infrastructure and synchronous and asynchronous transfers without standard signaling infrastructure.

We focus primary on the research, development, and quality of rich multimedia services (audio, video, text, and presence) using standard signaling protocols (H.323, SIP), services (MCU), and their relation to the whole environment. Specific goal is a targeted support for design and construction of communication (videoconferencing) rooms located at the CESNET member institutions and eventually elsewhere. All this work will be complemented with strong security considerations.

We work on the development of the user controlled elements for multipoint synchronous communication. New research is focused on the QoS enabled elements. We also work on the multipoint wide area transmission of uncompressed HD and 4K video, with the use of active element infrastructure and with a perspective use of optical multicast. We also study psychological aspects of collaborative environments.

We operate streaming servers used by the academic community. The research focuses on the multimedia search engine. We also collaborate with the media industry on wider deployment of the streaming and online broadcasting in content production and postproduction area in the HD and higher quality).