The Video Server Implementation with NETSHOW Services

Abstract

The video server is a distributed, fault-tolerant real-time fileserver. It provides data streams at a constant, guaranteed rate to a large number of clients, in addition to supporting more traditional file system operations. It is intended to be the basis for multimedia (video on demand) fileservers, but may also be used in other applications needing constant rate data delivery. The fundamental problem addressed by the video server design is that of efficiently balancing user load against limited disk, network and I/O bus resources. This paper describes the video server design and an implementation of Netshow services that runs on a collection of personal computers connected by an ATM switch.