Active Elements for High-Definition Video Distribution

Active Elements (AEs), an extension of user-empowered programmable (active) routers, provide support for multimedia distribution in collaborative environments. They can be organized in distributed systems to mitigate the scalability problem for very bandwidth and/or processing power demanding distribution patterns. We present a prototype implementation of Active Elements based on JXTA peer-to-peer framework. As shown in this paper, the AEs are flexible enough to be used for distributing high-definition uncompressed video, while also providing additional processing possibilities when distributing lower bandwidth streams like compressed HDV video streams.