Multimedia Over IP for Thin Clients: Building a Collaborative Resource-Sharing Prototype

Abstract

This paper explores the issues and the techniques of enabling multimedia applications for the thin client computing. A prototype of a video communication system based on H.323 family of ITU-T recommendations is used to demonstrate the support of multimedia applications with a terminal server and thin clients such as Windows-based terminals. The studies on the network applications over thin clients are composed of two parts: (1) the collaborative client-server conference system and (2) the universal plug-in architecture. With the proposed architecture, an application of multi-user audio/video conference system is devised for illustrative purposes. The universal plug-in technique is devised to shift jobs from thin clients to a supporting server, thus reducing the computing overhead required by the clients. The processed result at the supporting server is transcoded to a pre-defined universal format and then sent back to the thin client. This plug-in architecture is implemented and empirically evaluated.