StreetTiVo: Using a P2P XML Database System to Manage Multimedia Data in Your Living Room

StreetTiVo is a project that aims at bringing research results into the living room; in particular, a mix of current results in the areas of Peer-to-Peer XML Database Management System (P2P XDBMS), advanced multimedia analysis techniques, and advanced information retrieval techniques. The project develops a plug-in application for the so-called Home Theatre PCs, such as set-top boxes with MythTV or Windows Media Center Edition installed, that can be considered as programmable digital video recorders. StreetTiVo distributes compute-intensive multimedia analysis tasks over multiple peers (i.e., StreetTiVo users) that have recorded the same TV program, such that a user can search in the content of a recorded TV program shortly after its broadcasting; i.e., it enables near real-time availability of the meta-data (e.g., speech recognition) required for searching the recorded content. StreetTiVo relies on our P2P XDBMS technology, which in turn is based on a DHT overlay network, for distributed collaborator discovery, work coordination and meta-data exchange in a volatile WAN environment. The technologies of video analysis and information retrieval are seamlessly integrated into the system as XQuery functions.