One of the major tasks of traditional general-purpose operating system is to provide an orderly and controlled allocation of processor among various executing programs competing for it in a fair and efficient manner. Multimedia applications have timing requirements that cannot generally be satisfied using the time-sharing algorithms of general-purpose operating systems. Integrating discrete and continuous data of digital audio and video requires additional services from operating systems, especially handling of time-constrained characteristics of continuous media data, which poses a real-time characteristics on the underlying scheduler. Implementing multimedia applications using a real-time scheduler leads to starvation of conventional applications. In this paper, we briefly describe three of the popular multimedia scheduling algorithms. We compare and discuss how adequate each algorithm is in handling the issue of starvation. Additionally, we propose a new improvement for handling starvation for one of the most popular multimedia scheduling algorithms
