Metadex A low-latency multimedia indexer for In-Vehicle Infotainment

Abstract

Modern cars contain fully equipped multimedia (In-Vehicle Infotainment, IVI) systems, which are capable of rendering video to several screens, audio playback to di erent locations, internet connectivity, third-party applications, indexing media of a user's nomadic devices and more. One of the problems the automotive industry faces today is mining the users' nomadic devices and making the contents available for playback in an acceptable time frame. Current mining software does not ful ll automotive requirements concerning the time between detection of a nomadic device, metadata extraction and subsequent serving of the metadata. Linux is becoming a popular operating system for IVI platforms. The GENIVI Alliance focuses on developing a standard Linux platform for the IVI industry, and this platform is the target for the Metadex software developed in this thesis. Since implementing an entirely new mining software would be out of the time frame of this thesis, a survey of existing open source multimedia indexers which could be used as a base for the new miner was conducted. The two candidates with the most appealing features for multimedia indexing in an embedded environment were chosen for evaluation. The candidates were Tracker and Nepomuk-KDE. A benchmark of these two candidates was performed to give a motivation of which candidate the future implementation would be based on. The resulting software yielded a signi cant improvement in the time between device detection and metadata availability. The improvements were achieved by indexing metadata in multiple stages where the granularity of the metadata was increased over time. The results con rm the possibility of achieving fast indexing of nomadic devices which is responsive enough to be used in an automotive environment. We believe that our choice of modifying existing open source software was a fundamental decision that allowed us to implement and meet the set requirements in the time frame of this thesis.