Streaming architecture

Using stream data is as simple and straightforward as pressing a web link but there are many processes and procedure that happened in the background to make the data available for a Web user (Wilson, 2007).

High quality video or audio file need to be first digitalize and imported to the computer.
Codec compresses the file and encodes it to the right format.
Files then have to be uploaded to the server which streams them to user’s computers.
To see streamed media user has to using browser navigate to the required file. Click the image or embedded player.
Then the browsers establish a TCP connection to the Web Server to which the file is hyperlinked and send over a GET request in HTTP. The Web Server hosting the Web page requests the file from the Media Streaming Server.
The software on the Streaming Server breaks the file into packets (blocks) which are being sent to the client computer using real-time protocols.

 The browser plug-in, standalone player or Flash application on client computer decodes the file as it arrives and discards the data. How is it done? The browser using MIME type (e.g. audio/mp3 or video/mpeg) interpret the content of the send data and process it by calling helper application (like RealOne Player, Windows Media Player, or Winamp) to open it. Next the browser writes the content of file to a scratch file that will be saved on the disk. And subsequently starts the media player and pass it the name of the scratch file. After that the media player starts fetching and playing the music, block by block.

The media player has four major jobs to do (Tanenbaum, 2002):

• Manage the user interface
• Handle transmission errors
• Decompress the music
• Eliminate jitter