pVD — Personal Video Distribution

Abstract

A user has several personal computers, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops, and needs to watch live camera feeds from and videos stored at any of these computers at one or more of the others. Industry solutions designed for many users, computers, and videos can be complicated and slow to apply. The user must typically rely on a third party service or at least log in. The Personal Video Distribution (pVD) system supports sending and viewing live and stored videos between any of a single user's computers, and allows for a smooth handover of play back between computers. The system avoids any third parties, and relies only on the user's personal computers. We present the architecture, design and implementation of the pVD prototype. The architecture is comprised of functionality for sending videos, subscribing to videos, and maintaining the video play-back state. The design has a local side sending and viewing videos, and a global side coordinating the switching and distribution of videos, and maintaining subscriptions and video state. The prototype is primarily done in Python. A set of experiments was conducted to document the performance of the prototype. The results show that pVD global side has low CPU usage, and supports a handful of simultaneous exchanges of videos on a wireless network.