InTech, 2011. — 166 p.For more than three decades computing devices have been equipped with multimedia applications, enabling users to record and play music, video, and images on their desktops. Since then, industry and academia researchers from around the world have focused on digitization of multimedia files, compression, and storage to enable highquality audio-visual experience. When networking and Internet technologies became commoditized in the 21st century, multimedia files started to spread rapidly as users began to consume and share music worldwide, thanks to the birth of services like Napster. As iPod became a household item around the world in 2001, users began enjoying the ability of carrying large amounts of high-quality music in a pocket-sized device, and play it for a long duration of time. They also enjoyed the user-friendly interfaces for buying and downloading music. Since 2005 Youtube’s immense popularity helped the proliferation of steaming videos over the Internet, with many web services and content providers now offering mainstream content, including TV series and feature movies. The introduction of the hugely successful iPhone in 2007 was a catalyst to a rapid shift of focus with competitive mobile phone manufacturers to offer feature-rich smart phones which integrate music, video, and photo applications, web browsing, emails, and many day-to-day tasks. This rapid move towards mobile multimedia applications and services posed many issues and challenges from user and technology perspectives.
As multimedia-enabled mobile devices are now becoming the day-to-day computing device of choice for users of all ages, everyone expects that all multimedia applications and services should be as smooth and as high-quality as the desktop experience. The grand challenge in delivering multimedia to mobile devices using the Internet is to ensure the quality of experience that meets the users’ expectations, within reasonable costs, while supporting heterogeneous platforms and wireless network conditions.
It is our great pleasure to publish a book that aims to provide a holistic overview of the current and future technologies used for delivering high-quality mobile multimedia applications, while focusing on user experience as the key requirement. The book opens with a section dealing with the challenges in mobile video delivery as one of the most bandwidth-intensive media that requires smooth streaming and a user-centric strategy to ensure quality of experience. The second section addresses this challenge by introducing some important concepts for future mobile multimedia coding and the network technologies to deliver quality services. The last section combines the user and technology perspectives by demonstrating how user experience can be measured using case studies on urban community interfaces and Internet telephones.Mobile Video – Quality of Experience
Understanding User Experience of Mobile Video: Framework, Measurement, and Optimization
QoE for Mobile Streaming
Network and Coding Technologies
Recent Advances in Future Mobile Multimedia Networks
Recent Advances and Challenges in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks
Source Coding and Channel Coding for Mobile Multimedia Communication
Measuring User Experience
Designing and Evaluating Mobile Multimedia User Experiences in Public Urban Places: Making Sense of the Field
Current Challenges and Opportunities in VoIP over Wireless Networks
