The Washington University Multimedia System (MMS) is a complete multimedia system capable of transmitting and receiving video, audio, and radiological images, in addition to normal network traffic, over the Washingon University broadband ATM network. The MMS consists of an ATMizer and three multimedia subsystems. The ATMizer implements the host interface, the interface to the ATM network, and the interface to the three multimedia subsystems. The video sybsystem encodes and decodes JPEG compressed video using two hardware compression engines. The audio subsystem encodes and decodes CD-quality stereo audio. The high-speed radiological image subsystem reformats radiological image data transmitted by a dedicated ATMizer for presentation on a high-resolution monochrome display. Although the MMS can be easily modified to operate with any host, the current implementation is based on a NeXT computer. This paper describes the architecture of the MMS, the software used with the system, and the applications which have been developed to demonstrate the capability and applicability of broadband ATM networks for multimedia applications
