Reducing Resource Usage Based on User Hints and Policies

Multimedia applications often have performance requirements that make these applications computing resource intense; e.g., the number of video frames displayed to the user must be about 25 frames per second. A user hint is an indication of the interest that a user has in an application. Examples of user hints include a screen saver being invoked or covering a window with another window. In the case that the user is running video, the occurrence of these hints imply that the user is no longer viewing the video. However, the resource usage of the application has not changed. This paper describes an architecture that make use of user hints to reduce the resource consumption of an application. The emphasis is on network traffic and CPU usage. Experimental results are presented.