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Applications and Operations Required for Multimedia

Each multimedia application handles one or more media type of information.

There are two levels of description for an application:

Functional level -- what the application does and source and display data formats. E.g. An application may deal with the retrieval and display of movies. It retrieves movies and displays them in a window.
System Level -- The entities that the application deals with and how it deals with them. In the above example we deal with video frames and voice samples and need to process these accordingly.

The following functionality should be provided by a multimedia system:

Digital Representation of Media -- Many standardised formats for many media
Capture: Digitisation of Media -- special Hardware/Software
Creation and editing -- assemble media and alter it
Storage Requirements -- significant for multimedia
Compression -- related to above and below, ie can save on storage but can hinder retrieval
Structuring and retrieval methods of media -- simple to advanced DataBase Storage
Display or Playback methods -- effect of retrieval must view data
Media Synchronisation -- display multimedia as it is intended

Typical Range of operations required for common media include:

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