On December 8th 2010, Isolde Scheurer successfully passed her Master colloquium. She wrote her Master thesis about “Development of algorithms for the management of media data on mobile storage media in infotainment systems”. She was supervised by Martin Krüger (Volkswagen AG) and me.

Low-end in-car-infotainment (ICI) systems are constrained in CPU power and memory. ICI systems – even when low-end – are expected to handle media files from external storage with good performance independently of the storage size. Today mobile media storage sizes are growing rapidly. Contemporary SD cards have capacities up to 64 GB. USB drives can even have 3 TBs of storage capacity. External media storages such as SD cards, USB sticks or hard drives that are connected may contain arbitrary files (different numbers, sizes and types). Thus, new media management algorithms are required that support good performance in scanning storage devices for media content while at the same time, for example, playing in shuffle mode without any delays – independent of the size of the storage attached, the structure of the file system or the files contained. In her work, Isolde developed an algorithm that takes into consideration the different constraints of ICI systems and storage devices in order to optimize the playback features of an infotainment system and increase the playback, scan and shuffle performance of low-end infotainment systems, independent of the size of the mobile media device attached, the file structure or its contents. The algorithm was implemented in software and integrated into an infotainment-system simulator that was developed by two Bachelor students (Tim Geiser and Julius Flohr).

Entwicklung von Algorithmen zur Verwaltung von Mediendaten auf mobilen Speichermedien in Infotainmentsystemen
Written by Isolde Scheurer, December 2010 at Volkswagen AG.
Second supervisor: Dipl.-Ing. Martin Krüger.