Introduction: Multimedia computing systems

✍ Scribed by Leana Golubchik; John C. S. Lui

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 50 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0884-8173
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1098-111x(199812)13:12<1055::aid-int1>3.0.co;2-k

✦ Synopsis

Recent technological advances in digital signal processing, data compression techniques, and high speed communication networks have made distributed multimedia information systems feasible. Already, multimedia systems play a major role in educational applications, entertainment technology, and library information systems.

Designing and developing multimedia information systems involves a multitude of aspects including: acquisition, compression, storage, access, presentation, and communication. The papers collected in this issue address some of these topics, namely: storage, authoring and presentation, and communication and supporting operating systems. Before introducing these papers, we briefly discuss trends in multimedia systems as well as characteristics of multimedia applications.

The main characteristics of multimedia applications that lead to difficulties Ž . Ž . and challenges in efficient design of a storage systems, b authoring systems, Ž .

Ž . c communication protocols, and d the corresponding operating system sup-Ž . Ž . port are that they have 1 large bandwidth and storage requirements, 2 low Ž . communication latency requirements, and 3 synchronization requirements of various multimedia sources, all of which are often coupled with real-time constraints. Furthermore, in designing and building large high performance multimedia storage and communication systems, one must consider a whole spectrum of applications, from relatively low bandwidth, high throughput, and ''just-in-time'' delivery of video-on-demand servers to very high bandwidth, relatively low volume, and ''ASAP'' delivery of supercomputing᎐scientific applications. Thus, such systems must be able to accommodate the various storage, performance, and reliability requirements of the different types of media and applications.

Efficient use of resources and proper design choices are key to achieving high performability and low cost multimedia information systems. Below, we briefly discuss some of these issues and tradeoffs in more detail, particularly those pertaining to the topics of the papers included in this issue.