Bitstream Binding Language – Mapping XML Multimedia Containers into Streams

Bitstream Binding Language (BBL) provides an abstraction layer between XML multimedia containers and the way their resources and metadata are published in a bitstream. It allows multiple bindings from a single source document to facilitate interoperability and applicability of the multimedia content to a wide range of terminals and users. BBL introduces a number of features not found in other XML fragmentation techniques – such as support for random-access – and provides a highly general framework for combining metadata with multimedia content in a transport format. This paper presents an overview of BBL and provides details of a Java implementation using the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework as a sample application.