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Playback

The playback interface of the server allows a client to peruse all the online archives, to allow the selection of one or more media and one or more streams for playback, to specify the destination conference for the playback, and to control the media during playback.

For playback a different client interface is used to access the server. The server presents this client with information showing which conferences have been recorded, which streams are available for playback, and which conferences are currently being played back and on which address.

The playback of the recorded data can be presented to the user in various ways:

1.
the user can choose to play a stream or many streams from an old conference into a new conference. In this scenario, all members of the conference can see the played-back streams.
2.
the user can choose to see a stream or streams presented to his workstation only. In this scenario only the user sees the streams.
3.
the user can choose to play back a recording as a presentation to a small group of people.

It would be possible to make the playback interface compatible with WWW browsers such as netscape or Mosaic. This would enable the media to be selected and replayed using a GUI, and avoids writing a special playback client but requires the server playback interface to look like a WWW server by using the http protocol [#!http!#] As we have already seen a mechanism similar to this has been successfully deployed by Anders Klemets of KTH in Sweden. The approach suggested here does require the playback interface of the server to look like a WWW server.

It may be possible to have a client that combined playback with recording in order to have a GUI that allows both recording and search and access to pre-recorded data. This may be desirable if one needed to provide an interface that looked like a traditional tape recorder. In this instance the client would connect to more than one server interface.

In some instances it may be desirable to have a full conference replay. As the server is able to provide synchronisation data for the media streams, then during playback it is possible to have all the media streams synchronised. The synchronisation means that the data is presented in near real-time rather than at an arbitrary rate which is dependent on the speed of the machine.


next up previous contents
Next: Editing Up: Server Interfaces Previous: Recording
Jon CROWCROFT
1998-12-03