Metadata Retrieval Using RTCP for Multimedia Streaming

Media streaming has now become very popular in the Internet, and metadata plays a significant role for media applications. Recently, with the growth of the multimedia service in IP network, RTSP and RTP has become a de-facto standard for streaming. However, these protocols do not include metadata transmission in itself. Instead, metadata delivery in IP network is done with other various protocols such as HTTP or SOAP over HTTP. Also file delivery protocol Such as FLUTE is used. But using different protocol from media streaming may induce protocol issues such as TCP-friendliness problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient way of metadata retrieval using RTCP. It uses identical protocol for streaming and metadata retrieval. Embedding metadata into RTCP Report also makes it easy to control the metadata transmission. Protocol extensions of SDP and RTSP for metadata subscription are also presented.