WebVideo. A tool for WWW-based teleoperation

The Internet and the WWW are a ubiquitous network with a media rich interface. WWW browsers display text, graphics, video, audio and data in open and proprietary formats. Forms convey input from the user to the server. Video and form-based feedback in the WWW allow remote control and teleoperation over the Internet, taking advantage of the relatively cheap, ubiquitous bandwidth and advanced user interfaces. The authors present a scheme to distribute multiple realtime video and data streams from a variety of sources and the interface to the controlled equipment. WebVideo for Windows and UNIX are server programs to send video from various sources (cameras, RGB-instrument-output, bitmap displays, computer generated animations) in many formats (RGB, RGB-RLE, JPEG, GIF) to multiple client browsers at the same time. The WebVideo server measures the available bandwidth and generates individual videostreams. To optimize performance, they introduce the CE/SC (Component Encoding/Stream Composition) mechanism to build multiple individually coded videostreams while the computationally intensive video compression is performed only once.