MAS (Media Application Server)
Tim Jansen
ml at tjansen.de
Thu Sep 5 21:07:10 BST 2002
For the multimedia NG discussion...
Today I attended a presentation about MAS
(http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net) and spoke to the guys at the Linux
Kongress, Cologne. MAS is basically a sound server, it could be used for
other realtime media though, and seems to be a very nice system. But the most
interesting news, at least for me, was that MAS is will be in X11R6.7. So in
a year or two it could be included in every XFree....
You can find the slides here:
http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net/lk2002.pdf
It has some very interesting properties:
- like arts the server can accept data in common compressed formats like mpeg
audio or ogg vorbis, thus reducing unneccessary network traffic or IPC.
- all communication between clients and server uses RTP. This is certainly the
right thing to do, especially for low-bandwidth connections, instead of
relying only on TCP (which is possible with MAS though).
- one important advantage of basing everything on RTP is that this can reduce
the latency for VoIP applications. The latency added by sound servers can be
quite bad for VoIP apps that need low-latency. Sending RTP to the application
that decodes the data first and letting the application then send it to the
sound server can cost several hundred ms. As all important VoIP protocols
(SIP and H.323) rely on RTP for transport you can avoid the problems by
letting the other end connect directly to the sound server and thus get
perfect latency
bye...
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