Building Babel: freeing multimedia processing and delivery from hard-coded formats

The amount of multimedia content available via the Internet, and the number of formats in which it is encoded, stored and delivered continues to grow rapidly. So too the number and diversity of the devices and software applications which produce, process and consume such content. This constantly changing landscape presents an increasing challenge to interoperability, since more and more software and hardware must be upgraded as new formats are developed. However, many of the operations performed on multimedia content are similar across coding formats. In recognising this, this thesis proposes several approaches to format-independent media processing, with an emphasis on content delivery. This considerably simplifies interoperability, since support for a new content format may be provided by disseminating a data file, rather than requiring application and device providers to extend and modify their software and hardware. A fundamental requirement for format-independence is the ability to describe the structure of any given format in a way that exposes how it may be fragmented for delivery or processing, and how other data important to the processing (for instance temporal or scalability parameters) can be extracted from the binary data. Several