The performance of currently available streaming media products will play an important role in the network impact of streaming media. However, there are few empirical studies that analyze the network traffic characteristics and Internet impact of current streaming media products. This paper presents analysis from an empirical study of analysis from an empirical study of the two dominant streaming multimedia products, RealNetworks RealPlayer and Microsoft MediaPlayer. Utilizing two custom media player measurement tools, RealTracker and MediaTracker, we are able to gather application layer and network layer information about RealPlayer and MediaPlayer for the same media under the same network conditions. Our analysis shows that RealPlayer and MediaPlayer have distinctly different behavior characteristics and exposes some of the impact of streaming media on the network and provides valuable information for building more realistic streaming media simulations.

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See also:

• The VideoTracer Web site for measuring the performance of commercial video on the Internet (can download RealTracker and MediaTracker).

• Mingzhe Li, Mark Claypool, and Robert Kinicki. MediaPlayer versus RealPlayer - A Comparison of Network Turbulence, Technical Report WPI-CS-TR-02-16, Computer Science Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, May 2002. Online at: ftp://ftp.cs.wpi.edu/pub/techreports/pdf/02-16.pdf