Chapter 32
Media and Complex Data Servers

by Advanced Information Systems, Inc.

In This Chapter

•  What Is a Media Server?

•  New Uses of Media Objects That Will Change Business

•  Oracle’s Answer to Media Data

•  The Oracle Media Server

•  Oracle Media Net

•  Oracle Media Objects

•  Oracle’s Media Cartridge

What Is a Media Server?

The Oracle Media Server is an inevitable response to the growing demand for video and sound commodities by both consumers and business. When we refer to video and sound commodities, we refer to either those commodities explicitly video and sound, such as a movie VHS tape, or to those commodities, like an engineering database, that simply use video and sound implicitly as part of their presentation.

If we look at relational theory, there is nothing inherent to it that prevented any RDBMS vendor from supplying a rich, endless object library of media objects since the theory took form in 1971. Media data has always been just a type of data. Just as written text is a type of data which we call character data; media data is just another type of data. Therefore, media data can exist as an atomic element in a relational database.

Media data is simply a type of data because it is characterized as a series of bit patterns just as character data is formed from bit patterns. Like character data, these patterns need a translation process to retrieve and display them. In the case of character data, displaying this data is done through standard console interfaces. Displaying media data is more difficult, requiring applications to read in the media data format and display the results to the user in real-time.

From a practical perspective, just as storing characters in a formal database is valuable, so is the storing of media objects. With a database you can manage, back up, and retrieve data within a uniform organized structure. Both simple and complex data can be organized within a database to facilitate user requests (see Figure 32.1).

Figure 32.1.  An RDBMS manages data requests; this data can include media objects.

Traditional multimedia has not been characterized as users requesting data from a database. Multimedia has been characterized as the broadcasting of media data—media data that is determined to be popular by the broadcasting agent.

In the traditional case of radio and television, different organizations have simply chosen one piece of media data, a movie for instance, and have broadcast their media “product” at a particular time. The only choice the consumer has in the market is which of the many broadcasts presented to choose.

Moving further in the direction of choice for the consumer regarding media objects would be the video store or the record store. Here consumers physically pick and choose the product they want to purchase or rent from a huge assortment of media objects.

In this second case, many of the tasks of a database are being performed by people running around. The video store can be seen as the storage of all the media data available. The shopper is the user who is requesting this stored information. The problem with this method is it reminds us of a day before databases, where data physically resided as organized and filed documents that needed to be manually retrieved. The user needs to go to the video store or someone has to go from the store to the user to complete the transaction of a video rental.

Databases originally became popular because they eliminated the need to keep huge amounts of physical documentation at the fingertips of users who needed the data. Users did not have to physically move to the place where the data resided. Instead, data could be stored and quickly accessed by users who had a computer. The disk space to store the data and sort it was far smaller than the filing cabinets needed to hold the data.

Just as traditional data is more efficiently stored on disk drives and organized by a database, you can see that media data could also benefit from the same revolution. In the video store, the shoppers are actually getting in their car, driving to a location, and browsing a large number of physical objects, VHS tapes. In a sense these people are performing database access methods. If you view the local video store database, the people who work and shop there are performing tasks that could be performed by a DBMS system (see Figure 32.2).

Figure 32.2.  All of the actions in the store are slow, time-intensive tasks that could be better completed by a computer.

This analogy argues for Video on Demand (VOD), a concept that Oracle has heavily pushed for. With Video on Demand, a consumer treats video rental in the same way a database user regards traditional data. With VOD, the consumer logs into a database, browses data (videos), and chooses which video he or she wants to rent for his or her media entertainment.

This concept can also be applied to our most primitive media example of pure broadcasting. A broadcasting company, such as a movie channel, can take real-time requests from users who want a myriad of different media products. This allows the broadcast to offer more than one product per time-slot for the many media consumers who want different things (see Figure 32.3).

Figure 32.3.  A network using a video server can maximize everyone’s media preference.

New Uses of Media Objects That Will Change Business

In today’s world there are many products and services for which video is used, but is either stored in a filing cabinet or broadcast at certain times for certain people. Here are some area’s of both business and home consumption where video databases will be playing a larger role.

Presentations

Many of today’s presentations are very dry and make use of a person speaking directly to an audience, which might involve a great deal of travel time. They also use 2D visual aids, such as slide-shows, graphics, or charts.

If presentations can be encapsulated into media objects, a great deal of time and money invested in human resources to deliver the presentation can be saved. By turning a presentation into video, a client can view it at his or her convenience. The viewer also sees a polished version of the presentation from the best seat in the house.

In the future, by storing presentation video as data, you will be able to “mix” different media objects and tailor them for a particular client. You can also stage presentations interactively, giving the audience the ability to ask a certain set of questions.