Structured multimedia authoring

We present the user interface to the CMIF authoring environment for constructing and playing multimedia presentations. The CMIF authoring environment supports a rich hypermedia document model allowing structure-based composition of multimedia presentations and the specification of synchronization constraints between constituent media items. An author constructs a multimedia presentation in terms of its structure and additional synchronization constraints, from which the CMIF player derives the precise timing information for the presentation. We discuss the advantages of a structured approach to authoring multimedia, and describe the facilities in the CMIF authoring environment for supporting this approach. The authoring environment presents three main views of a multimedia presentation: the hierarchy view is used for manipulating and viewing a presentation's hierarchical structure; the channel view is used for managing logical resources and specifying and viewing precise timing constra..

Processing Structured Hypermedia : A Matter of Style

With the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early nineties, hypermedia has become the uniform interface to the wide variety of information sources available over the Internet. The full potential of the Web, however, can only be realized by building on the strengths of its underlying research fields. This book describes the areas of hypertext, multimedia, electronic publishing and the World Wide Web and points out fundamental similarities and differences in approaches towards the processing of information. It gives an overview of the dominant models and tools developed in these fields and describes the key interrelationships and mutual incompatibilities. In addition to a formal specification of a selection of these models, the book discusses the impact of the models described on the software architectures that have been developed for processing hypermedia documents. Two example hypermedia architectures are described in more detail: the DejaVu object-oriented hypermedia framework, developed at the VU, and CWI's Berlage environment for time-based hypermedia document transformations

A distributed approach to retrieving JPEG pictures in portable hypermedia documents

In this paper, we single out one of the problem aspects of multimedia: how can one efficiently store high-quality picture information in a manner that does not make its retrieval characteristics incompatible with the needs of a (distributed) multimedia application. These needs include: timely access to data, predictable access to common (i.e., network) resources and ease in user specification of information. Our approach to solving this problem is to define adaptive data objects that adjust the amount and type of information given to an application as a function of resource availability. The key to our approach is that we transparently adapt the information presented to the application based on a set of pre-specified conditions that were defined by the application at author time. We discuss this work in the context of a parallel JPEG image decoder that provides adaptive images (with respect to data content and image representation) based on a transparent client/server negotiation scheme. Our work is based on the Amsterdam Multimedia Framework (AMF), a partitioning of control operations for supporting distributed multimedia. The parallel JPEG algorithm, AMF and the negotiated control algorithm are explained