Use of COTS for raw video streams integration

This document presents a study about the convenience to use COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) and a middleware to implement the integration of raw video streams. This study is done to gain insight on the different technologies dedicated to the video transmission over generic LANs like Ethernet and a possible technique to free the application level from the exact knowledge of the networking facilities and technology used. The main development platform employed for this integration purpose is CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). It is preferred over RMI (remote method invocation) or RPC (remote procedure call) for its extended use and its easy adaptation to different programming languages. Moreover, transmission of video directly over plain sockets is also analyzed and compared to our middleware CORBA model. The workbench to test them is also described. The difficulties of the development like special implementations for video stream transmission are detailed to facilitate the results discussion and comprehension.