Synchronization in the MAEstro multimedia authoring environment

MAEstro is a distributed, multimedia authoring environment designed to simplify the process of creating multimedia documents [5]. The environment consists of a suite of applications to manipulate various media, or sources of information. A messaging system, based on Sun remote procedure calls, is used to control playback of multimedia documents. This distributed nature of multimedia authorship and playback poses unique problems in the area of synchronization, but the MAEstro architecture also allows for a simple and relatively effective solution. The solution is a combination of policy to be followed by application programmers, and oneway (non-blocking) RPC calls during playback of multimedia documents [2]. The MAEstro solution to the synchronization problem works with any combination of media, if the author of a document is willing to live with coarse-grained synchronization (on the order of one second). Thus, MAEstro synchronization is not adequate for applications such as dubbing voice with video where the two media come from different sources, but for most applications, MAEstro synchronization is acceptable. This paper discusses the techniques used in the MAEstro environment to achieve synchronization.