Abstract
One of the most important emerging developments for improving the user/computer interface has been the addition of multimedia facilities to high-performance workstations. Although the mention of multimedia I/O often conjures up visions of moving images, talking text and electronic music, multimedia I/O is not synonymous with interface bells and whistles. Instead, multimedia should be synonymous with the synchronization of bells and whistles so that application programs can integrate data from a broad spectrum of independent sources (including those with strict timing requirements). This paper considers the role of the operating system (in general) and UNIX (in particular) in supporting multimedia synchronization. The first section reviews the requirements and characteristics that are inherent to the problem of synchronizing a number of otherwise autonomous data sets. We then consider the ability of UNIX to support decentralized data and complex data synchronization requirements. While our conclusions on the viability of UNIX for supporting generalized multimedia are not optimistic, we offer an approach to solving some of the synchronization problems of multimedia I/O without losing the benefits of a standard UNIX environment. The basis of our approach is to integrate a distributed operating system kernel as a multimedia co-processor. This co-processor is a programmable device that can implement synchronization relationships in a manner that decouples I/O management from (user) process support. The principal benefit of this approach is that it integrates the potential of distributed I/O support with the standardization provided by a “real” UNIX kernel.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
SIGGRAPH '89 Panel Proceedings, “The Multi-Media Workstation,” Computer Graphics, Vol. 23, No. 5 (Dec 1989), pp 93–109.
Bulterman, D.C.A., “The CWI van Gogh Multimedia Research Project: Goals and Objectives,” CWI Report CST-90.1004, 1990.
Bulterman, van Rossum and van Liere, “A Structure for Transportable, Dynamic Multimedia Documents,” Proceedings of the Summer 1991 Usenix Conference (Jun 1991), pp 137–156.
Mullender, van Rossum, Tanenbaum, van Renesse and van Staveren, “Amoeba: A Distributed Operating System for the 1990s,” IEEE Computer Magazine, Vol. 23, No. 5 (May 1990), pp 44–53.
van Renesse, van Staveren and Tanenbaum, “Performance of the World's Fastest Distributed Operating System,” Operating Systems Review, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Oct 1988), pp 25–34.
Accetta, Baron, Bolosky, Golub, Rashid, Young and Tevanian, “Mach: A New Kernel Foundation for UNIX Development,” Proceedings of the Summer 1986 Usenix Conference (Jul 1986).
Dale and Goldstein, “Realizing the Full Potential of Mach,” OSF Internal Paper, Open Software Foundation, Cambridge MA (Oct 1990).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bulterman, D.C.A., van Liere, R. (1992). Multimedia synchronization and UNIX. In: Herrtwich, R.G. (eds) Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video. NOSSDAV 1991. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 614. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55639-7_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55639-7_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55639-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47266-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive