Interactive contents authoring system based on XMT and BIFS

As the Internet has been widely used for all the area of industries, the traditional characteristics of communication and broadcasting has been merged into a new service such as interactivity based broadcasting. Under an interactive environment, viewers not only watch broadcasting programs provided from a contents provider such as traditional broadcastings, but also pass their requirements to a service provider, obtain supplementary information and search broadcasting programs on the basis of their individual component objects. In order to access a program in terms of its component contents, thus, it is required to compose a scene and have reactions on the basis of its individual objects rather than a whole program itself. Therefore, this paper introduces a new authoring system, which can easily and conveniently produce an interactive contents-based broadcasting program by using MPEG-4 technologies. The authoring system presented in this paper describes a program in terms of two formats such as a textual format (XMT) for readability and a binary format (BiFS) for transmission. Since the XMT format is a XML-like one, it is easier for a user to understand and edit a scene composition. Alterantively, BiFS is suitable for transmission because of its binary property.