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Challenges for Multimedia Systems

Supporting multimedia applications over a computer network renders the application distributed. This will involve many special computing techniques -- discussed later.

Multimedia systems may have to render a variety of media at the same instant -- a distinction from normal applications. There is a temporal relationship between many forms of media (e.g. Video and Audio. There 2 are forms of problems here

The key issues multimedia systems need to deal with here are:

Data has to represented digitally so many initial source of data needs to be digitise -- translated from analog source to digital representation. The will involve scanning (graphics, still images), sampling (audio/video) although digital cameras now exist for direct scene to digital capture of images and video.

The data is large several Mb easily for audio and video -- therefore storage, transfer (bandwidth) and processing overheads are high. Data compression techniques very common.


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Next: Desirable Features for a Up: Multimedia Systems Previous: Characteristics of a Multimedia
Dave Marshall
10/4/2001