Real-Time Performance Evaluation of Media Pipeline Plug-In Architectures

Deployment of real-time applications has become ubiquitous in recent years. These applications (e.g. streaming video over the Internet) however, are processor-intensive and require fast video-processing techniques for more flexible, efficient operation. Media pipeline plug-in architectures have been introduced to provide these capabilities in form of extensible, integrated frameworks. Several architectures are in existence and many future designs are expected. This paper serves to design a set of measurement metrics on which to base the comparative performance analysis of the real-time capabilities of two of the architectures; DirectShow and GStreamer.