Gamma: A Content-Adaptation Server for Wireless Multimedia Applications

Abstract

An important technique for wireless multimedia is content adaptation – the on-demand transcoding of multimedia from one format to another or from one fidelity to another so as to fit the specific needs of different wireless terminals, which typically have limited bandwidths and resources. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a content-adaptation server called Gamma, which supports the automatic and transparent transcoding for individual users according to their pre-configured user profiles. While there have been other works on multimedia transcoding in the literature, Gamma is novel in three aspects. First, we pay special attention to allow the incorporation of third-party transcoding programs. This open approach has been very important in the real world. As a result, Gamma can accommodate a broad spectrum of third-party transcoding utilities for video, image, audio, presentation, documents, etc. Second, we abstract out content-adaptation as a generic service