Multimedia Fundamentals: Media Processing and Communications

-- Clear organization of the content starting from the media operating system problems and networking challenges to integration of various media through synchronization and group coordination.
-- Up-to-date mappings among basic concepts, existing standards and current technologies.
-- Part of the IMSC Press series. IMSC is a federally funded research Multimedia program.In this second volume the authors present fundamental characteristics and properties of multimedia operating and distributed communication systems. Especially of interest to the readers will be (1) scheduling algorithms and other OS supporting approaches for multimedia applications with their soft-real-time deadlines, (2) multimedia file systems and servers with their decision algorithms for data placement, scheduling and buffer management, (3) multimedia communication, transport, and streaming protocols and services with their error control, congestion control and other Quality of Service aware and adaptive algorithms, (4) synchronization services with their skew control methods, and (5) group communication with their group coordinating algorithms and other distributed services. This is the second book of the three volumes to discuss the basic characteristics of multimedia operating systems, multimedia networking and communication, and multimedia middleware systems. The overall goal through all three volumes of the 'Multimedia Fundamentals' books is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner.