Multimedia searching over Internet has gained substantial popularity in the past two years, pushing the emergence of multimedia portals. The key issues are how to do access to multimedia data and so how to represent multimedia data to ease and to speed up such accesses. Access ways are evolving from keywords and related metadata to more intelligent representations (shadow semantics such information relationships inside the video itself). Furthermore, technologies such as Java, along with the

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... wing number of Web browsers that can execute Java applets facilitate distributed multimedia accesses. Networking and computational performances are key concerns when considering the use of Java to develop performance-sensitive distributed multimedia search engines. This paper makes three contributions to the study of such performance-sensitive distributed multimedia search engines. First, we describe the innovative architecture of MEVISE, the MediaSys VIdeo Search Engine over a large scale network. Second, we introduce the content-based representation of the video data inside the MediaSys server. Third, we present the search capabilities of MEVISE.