CI-P: Shared Open-Source Tools in Support of Multimedia Systems Research

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This Community Infrastructure-Planning (CI-P) project will focus on planning for a community infrastructure project to develop a multimedia toolkit to help catalyze multimedia systems and networking research. The proposed multimedia toolkit will solve a number of problems faced by the multimedia systems community. By providing a toolkit that is focused more on readability, modularity, and ease of modification, we expect that such a toolkit will help to decrease the time it takes to train new graduate students to become multimedia researchers and allow them to more readily create new technology rather than making modifications to highly-optimized, brittle software tools that are used today.Early multimedia toolkits such as the Berkeley MPEG-1 tools or Open Mash tools from the 1990s helped to catalyze research in the multimedia community by providing a set of tools that made it relatively easy to experimentally deploy, test, and measure multimedia systems. The succession of video compression standards like H.264 / MPEG-4 and H.265 / HEVC, however, has had a negative impact on the ability to do experimental video systems and networking projects as well as the ability to use recent standards in an educational setting due to the high complexity of the compression tools. This project will address this through a multimedia toolkit with the following goals: - Significantly reduce training time to bring students up to speed on the latest video compression and decompression tools, - Enable more rapid modifications to video coding algorithms and provide the ability to more quickly build new multimedia systems, and - Provide several profiles for the research community to use so that results across different research projects can be more readily compared.The planning phase of this open source tool in support of multimedia systems includes: (i) surveying and gathering the needs of the research community with respect to their research and the education of their students, (ii) designing the overall architecture, and (iii) soliciting further feedback from the community with regards to the toolkit.