ACTIVE NODE TRANSCODER CONTROL CENTER

User Manual

 

Internetworking and Media Communications Research Laboratories
Kent State University

Last Updated: January 31, 2000

Bug report: mailto:comments@medianet.kent.edu


 

 

Overview
How to Obtain “Active Node Control Center”
How to Compile
How to Run:

 

Overview:

Active Node Transcoder Control Center is the program, which provides GUI interface for the Active Video Transcoder (AVT). It provides a network impairment simulation for the active node. It gives an easy way to configure AVT in following three modes:

 

  1. Adjustment of the bit-rate: reduction of the output bitstream bit-rate (size) comparing to the input one.

 

  1. Bit re-allocation – providing areas of different visible quality.

 

  1. Motion Vector (MV) bypass: reducing coding time by reusing some information about MV.

 

In the following document you will find information about how to configure and run“Active Node Control Center” program.This is an interim distribution of a system under development and has been tested only on a limited platform, and is intended for internal use only. 

 

 

How to Obtain “Active Node Control Center”:

By default the source code file “VControl.java” should be in the ./test directory on the transcoder machine after you’ve doneall necessary steps for s-mvX-p.tar distribution installation (see “AVT user document”).

 

 

How to Compile:

For compilation you should have installed jdk 1.2.1 or later version of java distribution.

To compile the programgo to the ./test directory and type in the command line:

 

%javac Vcontrol.java

 

where javac is the name of java compiler on you machine.

 

 


How to Run:

To run “Active Node Control Center” go to the ./test directory and type

 

%java Vcontrol

 

you will see “Acitve Node Control Center” window pop up.

 

Note: you can start “Active Node Control Center”, before of after you start running Transcoder.

COMPONENTS:

“Active Node Control Center”window consists of two parts:

 

  1. Node Control
  2. Application Control
  3.  

Node Control part provides:

 

a)     Network Bandwidth slider – it changes the target bit-rate parameter for incoming video encoding.

 

 

b)     CPU load – changes MV bypass option ON/OFF. In the case of high CPU load MV bypass coding should be preferred, because it takes less time to encode same video stream.

 

 

Note: Critical point here is 50% of CPU load on the slider scale. If the slider is on the left of that point, then MV bypass mode would be OFF. It would be ON, if the slider is on the right of 50% point.

 

Application Control part provides the control over “quality window(s)”—area(s) with different video:

 

a)     Manual tracking:

Press the “Manual tracking button and a new window will pop up to provide settings for quality windows.

 

*  To make the “quality window” press the button displaying the number of a window you would like to make, then just press the button on the grid area and dragging mouse set the size of the window. 

 

 

*  Control “quality parameter” could be changed with the “quality value” slider. The color of the window will change. The darker it is, the less number bit will be allocated for that window, the worse quality this area will have on the displaying video. The lighter it’s, the more quality the window will have.

 

 

*           You can set “quality parameter” before or after you set a “quality window.” Doing the same procedure you can select up to three “quality” windows.

 

Note: 

*  The number of the window sets priority for it’s displaying. It means if you have more than one window dragged over each other and if any of them have different “quality values”, then the window with bigger sequence number will“cover” other windows in “quality” sense.

 

 

*  Though you make all “quality” windows on the virtual frame all the changes will take effect on the actual displaying video stream.

 

 

b)     Machine tracking – under development and currently unavailable. /Integrating AVT and eye tracker and providing quality window for the eyes. /

 

 

c)      Content tracking—under development and currently unavailable. / Analyzing video and keeping the quality windows on the particular objects. /