A taxonomy on multimedia synchronization

Abstract

Multimedia systems allow the integration of data streams of different types, including continuous media (audio and video) and discrete media (text, data, still images). The information contained in these data streams is often interrelated, and multimedia systems must guarantee to maintain such relationships as the streams are stored, transmitted, and presented to the user. This is usually called multimedia synchronization. Unfortunately, different authors use the term with different and often confusing meanings. The authors propose a taxonomy of multimedia synchronization, introducing three layers of abstraction: a media layer dealing with inter-stream synchronization, a stream layer specifying inter-stream synchronization, and an object layer defining the relationships between multimedia objects in the style of an authoring language. An example illustrates the taxonomy throughout this work.<>