SEARCH ENGINE TO MONITOR AND VERIFY STREAMING AUDIO SOURCES

摘要

An automated method for periodically evaluating media streams on a network of computers. In the first embodiment, a Universal Stream Tuning Service (USTS) (120) that gives users the ability to locate and receive media streams from the Internet (110). The invention also is used to determine the availability of various media streams and identify various characteristics of each stream. By repeatedly obtaining the addresses, attempting to establish communication with each media stream, and then reporting the results to the system so that it can verify that each media stream is accessible and report the various characteristics of the stream. The system is provided with a CODEC server (144) that provides streams that are compressed and coded for specific media players. The user equipment (150) contains at least one codec player (154).