Chapter 1 Concepts; What Is Streamed Digital Video - Oracle Video server Manual

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Concepts
This chapter is intended to introduce you to streamed digital video and video
servers in general, as well as the advantages offered by Oracle Corporation's
unique implementation of video server technology.
While this chapter deals primarily with higher-level conceptual information, it also
presents enough details of video server architecture to understand the technology
and its capabilities.

What Is Streamed Digital Video?

If you have purchased a digital versatile disk (DVD) of a favorite movie, you're
already familiar with digital storage and delivery of multimedia content. When the
producers record the laser disc, the information is interpreted and encoded
digitally, then this digital representation is recorded onto the disc. When you play
the laser disc, this digital representation is then decoded, and the result is the video
display that you see.
Streamed digital video works in much the same way as the digital video you've
already used: the video is initially recorded in either traditional analog (unbroken,
continuously varying representation) formats or directly into a digital format. If the
original video is in a traditional format such as videotape, it is then encoded into a
digital format that can be stored on disks and decoded for playback.
Streamed video, however, is fed from a server computer with large storage and
delivery capabilities to a client machine that decodes and displays the streamed
video as it arrives. This eliminates the need for the video to physically reside either
on a playback medium (such as the laser disc) or locally on the machine that
displays the video.
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