Towards a Universal Viewer for Digital Content

In this paper we present a distributed setup for the viewing of digital data within a large number of formats. Through the use of software servers 3rd party software is automated and made available as functions that can be called within other programs. Using multiple machines containing software and running software servers a conversion service is built. Being built on top of 3rd party software the conversion service is easily extensible and thus can be made to support a large number of conversions. We use this service to build a “universal” viewer by converting given files among a large set of file formats to a relatively small subset of formats that are renderable by a given viewer (e.g. web browser). We describe this service and the underlying software servers as well as the future directions we are planning on taking.