Video content abstraction as a basis for the specification of video communication scenarios

Digital videos play an important role today: they are used for entertainment, for communication and for information exchange. Within the internet, there are many sources that provide video content in different ways. Videos can be streamed in real-time or downloaded for local usage. In all these scenarios, video content is exchanged using some sort of binary serialization format. Consequently, compatible decoders are required if the binary representation is to be restored. In our work, we use an abstraction mechanism that allows for referencing and accessing digital video content in an interoperable way. As the abstraction also is supposed to be human-comprehensible, the abstraction constitutes the basis for describing the exchange of video information among humans and devices in a unified manner. In this paper, we will explain how the abstraction can be used to specify general video communication scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce a Java library that encapsulates decoding as well as transmitting functionalities in order to provide video content using our proposed abstraction, regardless of how and where the video is actually stored. We will further show how the library can be used to implement video communication scenarios in a straightforward way.