Delivery of video mail on the World Wide Web

This study was initiated to examine the feasibility of providing multimedia mail, in particular video mail, on the existing World Wide Web platform. In this instance, the Web browser will act as the user agent of the mailing system. With this, users will be able to compose, send and read video mail directly on the Web. This paper examines a number of possible system architectures that can be employed for the development of video mail. Based on the following key issues: portability of system, flexibility of system, Internet standard support, security and authentication, and message compression and storage, a final architecture was selected to build video mail. The approach taken is that the system will be interfaced to the Web using a standard HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server and a standard Web browser. This is achieved through the use of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs and forms which reside in a standard HTTP server to provide the functionality of video mail, and a separate mail server for the storage and management of messages. This will cause the HTTP server to behave as if it is an electronic mail (E-mail) system. Video mail has been successfully implemented at the School of Applied Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The development work has been carried out on a Sun SPARC5 workstation and the Typhoon relational database system was used to construct the mail server. All software codes were written in C or C++. A video capturing application used in conjunction with a SunVideo card has been developed for video and audio recording. The paper also addresses implementation issues pertaining to the use of CGI programs, mail server development, and video and audio management.