Quality Planning for Distributed Collaborative Multimedia Applications

The tremendous power and low price of today s computer systems have created the opportunity for exciting applications rich with graphics audio and video Despite this potential planning computer systems to support the intensity of these multimedia applications is an extremely difficult task We have developed a flexible model and method that allows us to predict multimedia application performance from the user s perspective Our model takes into account the components fundamental to multimedia application quality latency jitter and data loss In applying our method to three specific applications we have identified some general traits 1) processors are the bottleneck in performance for many multimedia applications 2) networks with more bandwidth often do not increase the quality of multimedia applications and 3) performance for many multimedia applications can be improved greatly by shifting capacity demand from computer system components that are heavily loaded to those that are more lightly loade

YMAGE : a resource for real-time sharing of high resolution digital images.

Digital images have primarily been viewed using desktop applications. These types of programs attempt to load all of an image\u27s graphical data into memory in order to display the image in its entirety. The method is effective for images that are relatively small, but for large, high-resolution images, this tends to be slow and resource-exhaustive. Coupled with degraded system performance are the issues of storage and image access. Some newer programs make efforts to mitigate these problems, but few do so satisfactorily. The Ymage System was designed as an alternative to conventional approaches for managing and viewing images. The system provides high accessibility to data while minimizing demands on the machine from which the image is viewed. The design accomplishes these objectives and even the initial, low-performance implementation presented here can compete with existing systems. Further, it appears that the flexibility of the design lends itself to use for non-visual applications such as distributed image processing. It is possible that development of the Ymage System could make a significant impact on the approach to the development of image-handling software in the future