What MediaDART is

MediaDART is an open-source framework for managing multimedia resources on a cooperative network of PCs.

Key features

• Decentralized architecture - relies on an arbitrary set of nodes interconnected through a p2p network, so new nodes can be added without any need for a central registration service
• Fully scalable - extra nodes can be added at any time in order to increase storage and processing power.
• Standard compliant - supports the most common encoding formats.
• Balanced and redundant storage - resources are stored on nodes and are automatically replicated to other nodes, so that there is a reasonable chance that a resource is still available if a node goes down for any reason.
• Batch editing of resources - re-sampling, transcoding, cropping, resizing, trimming, watermarking, etc..
• Composition of visual resources: allows spatial/temporal aggregation of video and images, e.g. picture-in-picture, sliding messages, mosaic, fading-in, fading-out, etc.
• Extraction of metadata - allows extraction of EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata from resources.
• XMP embedding - allows embedding XMP metadata inside resources.
• Concurrent resource processing - operations on a set of resources are automatically distributed across several nodes in order to balance the processing load.
• Fail-safe resource processing - in case of node unavailability (e.g. a node goes down) operations on resources are automatically restarted on another node.
• Multi-tasking - many applications can concurrently work on the same MediaDART network, sharing a common pool of resources.
• NAT enabled - can be installed behind firewalls and address translators.
• Secure - uses certificates and https to protect web services; UDP protocols and p2p routing are protected with shared secrets and HMAC routing.
• Efficient - novel protocols minimize the load required to maintain the routing tables and the traffic required by the replication algorithms; no performance degradation until high churn rates (> 30%).
• Python toolkit API - a python API provides an abstraction layer above the p2p network, making easier the development of applications.
• Web service API - provides direct access to the framework from any programming language supporting XML/RPC.
• Plugin support - allows extending with user-defined algorithms the feature extraction and resource processing.
• Open source - is distributed under a LGPL-2 license.

Requirements

For a minimal installation of MediaDART you just need one PC (Intel 32 or AMD 64) with Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04).

However, in order to fully exploit MediaDART advantages, many PCs should be added to the p2p network.