Multimedia systems and applications

Definition: Multimedia is a woven combination of digitally manipulated text, photographs, graphic art, sound, animation and video elements. When the end user has control over the multimedia such as controlling when and what elements to view, its known as interactive multimedia. When the user can navigate the interactive media through hyperlinks known as hypermedia Multimedia is concerned with how to use text, images, graphics, animations, sound and video to deliver your massages and content in a meaningful way. It involves the designing, organizing and producing multimedia projects and avoiding technical and legal pitfalls along the way. Multimedia requires hardware, software and protocols that aid in making the text characters look pretty, making the graphics colourful, digitizing the audio and video segments. The user interface (Graphical User Interface GUI) should also be user friendly to enable both professional and non professional users easy access to the multimedia products. When weaved together the sensational elements of multimedia ie the dazzling pictures and animations, the engaging sound, the compelling video clips and raw textual information, multimedia have far reaching effects in the thoughts and actions of the audience. Multimedia requires large amount of digital memory when stored in end users library such as CD-ROM (Compact Disk Read Only Memory), DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) Flash Drives etc Also required is a large amount of bandwidth to enable quick delivery multimedia products. Examples of superhighway are optical fibre cables that use transparent glass to transmit light signals and satellite links. Stages in making multimedia Planning and costing: the idea or the/need that is refined into goals and objectives. A creative graphical look and feel needs to be developed. Budget looked into and a prototype developed. Designing and producing: performing the planned tasks, requires feedback cycles to satisfy the end user. Testing: to ensure that its functional and to the set standard. It meets objectives. Delivering: putting to use, at the users disposal. Multimedia products require good creativity and organizational skill, they are normally done by teams rather than individuals. Team members bring about various abilities and play different roles. Eg multimedia producer, designer, interface designer, script writer, video specialist, audio specialist, programmers, editors, technical specialists, web masters etc all working together realising a dream.

Main users of multimedia- applications

The main areas where multimedia is applied are: 1. Entertainment industry: 2. Interactive media: 3. Video on demand Other areas are in

Business applications eg presentations- overhead presentations, training, marketing, advertizing, product demos, simulation, databases, catalogs, instant messaging, E-mails, voice and video conferencing using distributed networks. School applications E-learning medical students can follow the steps of heart surgery being carried out in USA from any remote location online. The same content can put in databases for future retrieval or be put in CD-ROM or DVD. ITV (Interactive TV) is used to join students from different campuses into one class with one teacher. The teacher could be relaxing in a Mombasa beach hotel communicating to the students via wireless communication equipment. This can be good for students who do not wish to spent money on fuel to college, or are avoiding traffic jam. Home applications home consumers are using computers attached with CD-ROM or DVD to access material on cooking, gardening, home design, remodeling, repair etc. there also Internet games. The computers can also be hooked up to TV sets. Public place applications: its used to provide information and help customers, in places like railway stations, groceries, museums, hotels etc. the multimedia is piped to wireless devices such as cell phones and PDA hotels can have automated check in/checkouts, museums can have rich detailed information about a display. Virtual reality applications: marine and aero plane trainees can learn a lot about what goes on in real life eg offloading and loading a oil tank or landing and taking of airplanes. Internet uses Virtual Reality Modeling Language VRML to produce the 3-D images required in virtual reality. Virtual reality requires a lot of computing power, storage memory and large bandwidths.
Other Multimedia applications: Collaborative computer supported games The three areas of entertainment industry will drastically advance due to: Amount of programming available to audiences will increase the drive to video on - demand services.

The use of interactive television facilities for video on - demand will make it possible to incorporate audience participation into existing programming. Participation will move from a highly controlled audience to open-ended group collaboration and teaming; from many- to -one to many-to-many.

The size of the entertainment market is a significant force in creating economies of scale that will allow other application to emerge. The evolution of multimedia computer hardware could be determined by the source of multimedia consumer products. Video on - demand. Driven by the cable television (TV) industry, telephone industry, Internet, broadcasters etc. it provides greater flexibility on what TV/ video programs are shown and when. Video on demand takes advantage of a two-way communication between the home/audience and the video source. This requires enough bandwidth to carry the compressed video signal. The viewers use hand held devices to control and navigate a selection menu and choose a program. The program starts to play in real time or near real time. The viewer can pausing, reposition and use other VCR like controls, thus giving him or her greater flexibility. Interactive cinema. It allows the audience is cinema to vote on the next step of the hero or heroine. This makes the film to be unpredictable after repeated shows, thus making it worthy to watch the film again and again. However the scripting of interactive movies is a challenge since all paths must connect in a coherent way to the previous scenes. Collaborative computer supported games: It allows a simulated on line game, with thousands of collaborative participants. This is different from the traditional computer games that set players against a computer. Other multimedia applications are: Home shopping: using cable TV channels, a variety of retail goods can be marketed. The customer can purchase by dialing their telephone numbers and pay by their credit cards. The convergence of TV and the computer has increased the number of channels thus allowing home shopping and interactive TV. Video-telephone is based on the convergence of the TV and telephone thus allowing subscribers to dial the retailer of interest, but would connect to a live video salesperson or a prerecorded video showcase. Communication for health care: imaging applications are prominent and together with multimedia technology permits visual data to be easily viewed, shared, and processed. This enable hospital records to be put on line and shared online by collaborative physicians. Leading to:

Reduced cost of delivering health care Increased revenue opportunities Improved patient health care.

Geographical information services GIS: helps in management of buildings, roads, power lines, railway tracks etc. uses specially designed computer database management system to provide on-line support for these types of applications. With the addition of multimedia information, visual and audio data can be associated with landmarks and other points of interest. Education: multimedia has the ability to convey picture, audio, animation or movie materials that can be used to capture the learners attention and pass knowledge, skills and change the learners altitude. Education is second to entertainment in usage of multimedia. It uses integrated design and manufacturing software environment, flexible robotic work cell technique, including coordination between robots during subsystem errors. Impact of ubiquitous multimedia services: The full impact of multimedia application will felt when multimedia computing and communication became as widely available as telephone and TVs. This will lead to social-transform greater expression, greater information access, greater involvement of the audience in creating multimedia content. Multimedia systems challenges: The challenges are generally technical they include; Temporal and inter-media synchronization within the: operating system, network architecture and Presentation systems.

Higher performance networking of time based media On-line storage, online access and online interchange of multimedia content is another challenge. New user interface paradigms New tools for authoring and using multimedia information are a challenge.

Multimedia and computers technology convergence. Multimedia technology is breaking down boundaries between devices for computing, communications, and entertainment. New web applications will change the way we do businesses and get entertained.

Multimedia devices are expected to replace ubiquitous telephone and Tv and change many activities associated with them. In the computing world there are devices that are a hybrid of two or more devices ie not the traditional TV or telephone but are device that can act as both. In telecommunication, broadcasting TV and radio signals are being delivered to the homes via optical fibre in the same way as Internet at cheap and large bandwidths. The entertainment industry has taken advantage of this and has come up with technologies that can make use the multimedia and computers eg ( cable-CATV and broadcast TV). New technological trends Electronics increased usage of integrated circuits IC with Very large Scale IC-VLSIC with increased electronic density. Communication- there is increased bandwidths at low cost, switching speeds and better error control methods. Presentation technology- use of digital technology has improved presentation and enabled High Definition TV HDTV, colour Liquid Crystal Displays LCD, and Video Graphic Adaptors VGA that are not only large in size but of high picture quality (resolution) Input technology: its offering great portability and new interaction modes. Young people are using telephone answering machines, infrared remote controls, fax machines, barcode scanners, credit cards digital signal processing DSP are common place, all changing the way they do business. Multimedia appliances; Computer based video phones: It works like the conventional telephone line that connects computers, fax and telephone answering machines. It relies on real-time encoding (compression) and decoding (decompression) of the audio and video and modern technology to make it work. Similar capability is now being offered on plug-in boards to provide video conferencing from the computer desktop. The next step involve building this functionality into portable computers and add the software services that provide personal communication management. Computer based consumer entertainment.

Entertainment devices can be a computer, TV, VCR or a game machine or all of the above. Interactive TVs are expected to bring all the above forms of entertainment together. Multimedia design considerations Industrial design considerations It must make sense to the user eg desktop computers are not designed to be used from a remote area, the mouse, keyboards are meant to be used in a small geographical area. To use it in the living room with a TV may require redesigning it since TV are meant to be viewed from a distance. Human factor consideration. The human factor is very important, the design can be functioning very well but if it strains the user then its not good, the design must be user friendly to gain great acceptance, Key multimedia challenges Technical: manufacturing of VLSIC and makes the hardware devices cost-effective. The VLSICs will allow high speed processing power. Technical compatibility of different devices from different manufacturers is also a challenge. Regulatory: Governments and agencies should control the way we use multimedia and regulate who has control over certain things though the Internet is breaking those barriers that required licenses to do certain things from Governments. Social: obstacles in accepting new technologies as soon as they became available. People are scared of their privacy. Bill of rights is meant to ensure that people enjoy their life, have liberty in pursuit of happiness without limits but shouldnt there be limits in what we do in the name of freed? Multimedia systems design requirements. The need for multimedia data types in existing computing and communications systems is leading to new design considerations for: Synchronization: its the coordinated ordering of events in time. It can be done at the bit level, character level or block level of transmitted signal. Synchronization has real time deadlines and failure to synchronize can be handled using say frame skipping or skipping such that the application can still continue to execute. Orchestration or meta scheduling: Orchestration is the management to achieve end to end synchronization. Each resource manager include a scheduling function which orders the current request for serving so as to meet the required performance bounds.

Quality of service: affected by transmit delays, error rate, throughput, jitter that must be managed The design should ensure high performance reduce complexities lower cost. Areas of consideration are: Distributed objects management facilities Hypermedia document architecture Multimedia interchange formats Operating systems services Scripting languages Media formats Application toolkits Network architecture and protocols

Distributed multimedia systems: Should offer support for: Continuous media: video and audio have timing constraint that must be considered, they should be delivered in real-time (no delays). In addition continuous media occupy a large bandwidth when sampled. Compression methods can be used to reduce the bandwidth requirement and by extension reduce the cost of transmission and storage of continuous media. This however affects the quality of the media. Role of multimedia standards. They enable interoperability (universal access and distribution for components and exchanged information) among competing standards being produced by standards bodies, trade groups, vendors with significant market presence. Standards are for example CATV standards, public switched networks standards for LANs, MANs, WLANs. Colour terminologies Hue is one of the main properties of colour, its the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from stimuli that are described as red, green blue and yellow (unique hues) . light blue, vivid blue light defines lightness/chroma In painting hue is a colour without tint or shade. Colourfulness: its the difference between a colour against gray. Chroma is the colourfullness relative to brightness of another colour which appears white under similar viewing condition

Saturation its the colourfulness of a colour relative to its own brightness. Brightness- attribute of visual perception in which a source appears to be radiating or reflecting light. Luminance is a photometric measure of the luminous intensity per unit area of light travelling in a given direction. File compression: It is employed by web users because it reduces the number of bits (bytes) in a file (Zip file). Software such as WinZip can be used to expand the file back to its original size. This leads to faster file transfer over slow Internet connections and it also takes up small storage space

Types of file compression Lossy compression- eliminates unnecessary bits of information. Lossless compression- can reconstruct exactly the original file unlike lossy compression. The idea is breaking a file into a smaller file for transmission and or storage then putting it up together at the end thus restoring it back to its original form.

Lossless compression techniques do: Generate a statistical model for the input data Uses the model to map input data to bit sequences in such a way that is probable .Frequently encountered data will have shorter codes (output) that more improbable codes

Lossless compression uses Huffman coding for its; Simpler Faster however It produces poor results for probabilities closer to 1

In multimedia, every pixel but the 1st can be replaced by the difference to its left neighbour. This leads to a smaller value having much higher probability. Its often applied in sound files In images it applies difference to the top pixel(picture elements) In videos , its the difference to the pixel in the next frame. Limitation of lossless compression; It cannot guarantee compression for all input data set.

Applications of lossless compression. Graphic Interchange Format GIF It uses a simple substitution method of compression, which means a flat coloured image (with lots of repetition) will compress better than more complex, non repetitive image. Large areas of pixel that are all exactly the same colour compress better in GIF. Uses 256 colour limit ie 8 bits per pixel Portable Network Group PNG also uses lossless compression. Lossy compression- the general rule is file size reduces, quality of compressed file reduces Its used for reducing the file to a smaller size. It reduces the file size of bitmap picture. The original picture or file can never be regenerated exactly at the user end. So it cannot be used for software application files, databases and presidential inauguration speeches It however be used for: Joint Photographic Expert Group JPEG Its a lossy compression method that saves space by throwing away parts of the image. Its takes advantage of the inexact human eye since some image mistakes are not noticeable to the human eye. The human eye is more sensitive to brightness (grayscale data) variations than to Hue variations ie JPEG can compress the hue more. JPEG cannot be animated, does not allow transparency, its complex (uses 24 bits- 16M colour limit some of which can be false colours) and does a lot of processing. Its used in web pages, e-mails, digital camera cards etc Other image formats that use lossy compression are Tagged File Format TFF Multiple Network Graphics MNG

In multimedia, image compression techniques take advantage of the specific characteristics of images such as the common phenomenon of contiguous 2-D areas of similar tones. Every pixel but the 1st one is replaced by the difference to its left neigbours. This can also be applied in sound and videos. Photo-programs Photoshop, photoimpact, photodeluxe, paint shop pro, elements, corel they allow JPG quality adjustment.

Sound processing Sound requires the listener to remember what has passed, unlike a graphic where the viewer can keep on visualizing the graphic or image. In audio, music is in art form while the sound is used as a communication medium. Audio is defined as the disturbance in air pressure that reaches the human ear drum. Audio has terms of frequency, amplitude, time and other parameters. In designing audio multimedia systems we have to factor in the limitation of the auditory channel. The frequency range of human hearing. Human beings hear sound when the disturbance in the air increase in the region of about 20 cycles per second (20 Htz) as the lowest limit and 20,000 Htz as the upper limit for new born. The audio frequency range decrease with age. Frequency of a tone is a physical measure and the percept of pitch which the tone evokes. Amplitude of a tone is the physical measure and loudness is a percept. Dynamic range of human hearing. The loudness of sound increases logarithmically with the power of sound and its fair to express in decibel. The perceived pitch of a tone can be modified by changing the amplitude. Lowest value at 0.000283 dyne per square centimeter ( at 1 khzs signal uses 0 dB) the loudest would be100dB- 120 dB (point of pain) ie a Million times Loudness is not constant if the frequency of tone is changed. Spectral characteristic of human hearing: The human hear is sensitive to unnatural changes in the relationship between fundamental frequency and format structure eg when audio recording is played quickly than normal. Time varying aspect of natural sound Music tones have attack steady state and decay. In the steady state the spectrum remains constant. Research has shown that there are significant changes in the spectral components of a music tone over time. The attack portion of natural sound is crucial for identification. The attack portion is good for maintaining sound quality. It is important to know that when designing multimedia systems.

Masking One sound can make it impossible to hear another sound or one sound may shift the apparent loudness of another. That is masking. The masking of a sound by another can be total or partial. Parts of one sound can also mask other parts of another sound. Auditory masking can die away in a matter of milliseconds. If one tone is masking another, the effect depends on the separation in frequency. Sub-band coding and MPEG audio By exploiting the masking properties mentioned above we can come up with clever way of compacting the required data stream. One way of doing that is to use sub-band coding in which the signal is broken into bands which can be transmitted as a group of at lower data rates than required for original signals. A standard known as MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) provides a good example of sub band coding. Audio is documented as ISO/IBC DIS 11172 and MPEG is officially known as ISO-IBC/JTC1/SC29/WG11 it employs an encoder and a decoder-CODEC Modes for MPEG audio standard Single channel Dual channel (two independent channel, for example in two languages, coded in one bit-stream) Stereo (two channels coded in one bit-stream) Joint stereo (stereo pair coded exploiting redundancy between right and left channels)

Sample frequencies that are used are 32, 44.1, 48 kHtz Layer 1 maps the digital audio input into 32 sub bands, that is the available frequency range is divided into 32 bands. The conversion to sub bands is done for a frame of 384 audio samples. During each frame , the sub bands are sampled 12 times. But not every sub band is actually encoded. Layer 2 features additional coding of bit allocation, scale factors, and samples. As many as 3 scale factor is transmitted for each frame ie 1152 input samples in one frame.ie 36 sub band samples per frame. If the difference between successive scale factor are very small, only one scale factor is transmitted, freeing up bits for encoding the sub bands. In level 3 there 1152 input samples per encoded frame and the encoder is more complicated. The high frequencies above a certain point are encoded with better time resolution while the low frequencies are encoded with better frequency resolution. At Level 3 non uniform quantized takes place and adaptive segmentation of data

Transmission of digital sound It requires a sample rate convertor or chips to solve the problem of different sample rates (professional, semi professional, consumer markets). Some of the standards transmit 16 bits of PCM audio and can easily transmit 20 bits. Two channels are transmitted at once Pulse Code Modulation PCM Sampling Quantization Encoded

mClock information is encoded together with the data, several status bits are also transmitted as well such as sample rate as well as user programmed information. Video Aspect ratio Raster Sync Resolution horizontal, vertical Video performance measurements Measurement of resolution Gray scale response Noise Colour performance.

Reasons for video compression Saves storage space Increases access speed Digital motion achieved in PCs

Parameters considered in vimdeo compression Amount or degree of compression Image quality Speed of compression or decompression

Hardware and software requirement by compression methods How much compression How good is the picture How fast does it compress or un compress What hardware or software does it take

Image compression techniques Simple-reduces data through arbitrary lowering of bits per pixel(throws away) Interpolative- transmission of a subset of the pixels and using interpolation to reconstruct the intervening pixels. Reduces number of independent pixels contained in the output. Uses colour sub-sampling. Predictive-predicts next pixel or next line or frame, stores previous scene to built on the next scene. Future not completely different from the past Statistical- entropy coding, it takes advantage of statistical distribution of the pixel value of an image.

JPEG image compression terms standards JPEG architecture Encoding and quantization Statistical coding Predictive lossless coding Performance

MPEG formats MPEG-1 no interlacing used in Versatile Compact Disks VCD MPEG-2 its interlaced used in Digital Video Broadcast DVB(Transport Stream TS), Digital Versatile Disk DVD(Program Stream PS) and DVB S-2 streaming media MPEG-4 uses DVB S-2- streaming media Difference between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 MPEG-2 is for terrestrial broadcast (airwaves, cable and direct broadcast satellite TV systems) . Movies on DVD it defines transport stream TS (video/audio lossy media) and program stream PS (file based media, hard disk drives, optical disks and flash memories

MPEG-4 supports 3-D rendering and object oriented compatible files improved coding efficiency over MPEG-2 ability to enable multimedia(audio, video, text etc) error resilience to enable robust transmission ability to interact with the audio-visual scene generated at the receiver advanced audio coding AAC

advance video coding AVC enables different softwares and hardwares to create multimedia objects enables networks to have data transparency (data can be interpreted and transformed into other signal types compatible with any available network) provide end users with various animated objects standardized digital rights management signaling enables multiplexing and synchronization of data associated with media objects for efficiency of transportation interaction with audio-visual scenes which is formed on the side of the receiver.

The MP3 movement is one of the most amazing phenomena that the music industry has ever seen. Unlike other movements -- for example, the introduction of the cassette tape or the compact disk -- the MP3 movement started not with the industry itself but with a huge audience of music lovers on the Internet. The MP3 format for digital music has had, and will continue to have, a huge impact on how people collect, listen to and distribute music.

The MP3 Format A CD stores a song as digital information. The data on a CD uses an uncompressed, highresolution format. Here's what happens when a CD is created:

Music is sampled 44,100 times per second. The samples are 2 Bytes (16 bits) long. Separate samples are taken for the left and right speakers in a stereo system.

So a CD stores a huge number of bits for each second of music:

44,100 samples/second * 16 bits/sample * 2 channels = 1,411,200 bits per second

Let's break that down: 1.4 million bits per second equals 176,000 bytes per second. If an average song is three minutes long, then the average song on a CD consumes about 32 million bytes (or 32 megabytes) of space. Even with a high-speed cable or DSL modem, it can take several minutes to download just one song. Over a 56K dial-up MODEM, it would take close to two hours. The MP3 format is a compression system for music. The goal of using MP3 is to compress a CD-quality song by a factor of 10 to 14 without noticeably affecting the CD-quality sound. With MP3, a 32-megabyte song on a CD compresses down to about 3 MB. This lets you download a song much more quickly, and store hundreds of songs on your computer's hard disk.

Is it possible to compress a song without hurting its quality? To make a good compression algorithm for sound, a technique called perceptual noise shaping is used. It's "perceptual" partly because the MP3 format uses characteristics of the human ear to design the compression algorithm. For example:

There are certain sounds that the human ear cannot hear. There are certain sounds that the human ear hears much better than others. If there are two sounds playing simultaneously, we hear the louder one but cannot hear the softer one.

Using facts like these, certain parts of a song can be eliminated without significantly hurting the quality of the song for the listener. Compressing the rest of the song with well-known compression techniques shrinks the song considerably -- by a factor of 10 at least. When you're done creating an MP3 file, what you have is a "near-CD-quality" song. The MP3 version of the song does not sound exactly the same as the original CD song because some of it has been removed.
Challenges of data compression Synchronization

How to overcome synchronization Limitation of workstation operating systems. Timely response to continuous media Interrupt latency and throughput Priority inversion management

Periodic activity Deadline and recovery management QoS management and admission control

(continuous applications multimedia mail, hypermedia, conferencing systems, virtual reality, remote file processing) Goals of multimedia system services Handle live data remotely Handle stored data remotely Handle live data and stored data simultaneously Handle new kinds of services and media types.

Purpose of media streams Protocol map Convey media data with necessary information To do regulation Synchronization Time critical delivery of data

Rich information, retrieval and communication. CAD drawing animated with voice and video Product stimulation using animation and video Marketing material (video, documentation on comparative products) Video recording of users, customers, prior products On-line manuals using videos of equipment operation Sharing design information over WAN Multimedia mail containing video clips or pictures

Difference between Authoring system and presentation system Asymmetric tool book Aim tech icon author Authorizer professional

Barriers to widespread use of multimedia creation and presentation Cost of acquisition, developing of material Difficulties with production quality Enforcement of intellectual property rights Cost, availability of easy to use tools Lack of standards for delivery

Lack of clear vision for multimedia applications

Research trends that are likely to improve authoring and presentation systems/ WYSWYG multimedia document editing Better integration of tools and distributed resources Logical structures of presentation Integrated rapid story boarding Tool for constructing 3-D visual world.

Video teleconferencing- Approaches to real time visual communication Video phones Multisite video conferencing Computer based teleconferencing systems.

Video equipment Broadcast TV broadcast stations and networks. They are generally High performance High cost

Professional education and industrial applications- good performance Consumer home equipment and are generally Simple to operate High reliability Fair cost- (cost-effective)

Operating system support for continuous media applications These application are: multimedia mail, hypermedia, conferencing systems, remote teleprocessing and virtual reality. They require full motion digital video and audio. Ordinary OS can produce digital audio and display high resolution. Limitation of workstation OS Not good for timely system response required in continuous multimedia application CMA, No mechanism to maintain Quality of Service QoS for CMA

No overload management scheme for transient overload situations (unpredictable delay, jitter)

The OS for continuous media MUST support Multiple instances without jitter problem while reading video mail, music play program accelerating in speed when contenting programs terminate not overloading when running many video phone programs- should have intelligent overload control management scheme. Real-time support from OS Quality of Service based resource management.

Interrupt latency and throughput. Means UNIX cannot support real-time activities such as Music Instrument Data Interface MIDI data stream produce a frequent number of interrupt the kernel and that means it can not cope with CMA well. Priority inversion management. When real-real programs are forced to wait for non-real time programs to finish. Ie priority inversion causing unpredictable delays and jitter problems. Periodic activity: continuous media CM requires periodic service activities for transmission or presentation. The user has no control over the drawing rate of the CM objects. Temporal resolution this is when an overload is detected, the drawing may stop momentary then after a task terminates the drawing may speedup (implicit binding) of the timing constraint on the code. Deadline recovery management CMA have soft deadlines that is video conferencing can continue even if some images have not been processed in time. QoS management and admission control Static- where by users specify the QoS level at session creation time. The QoS is maintained till the end of the session. Dynamic- the QoS can change during the life time of a session.

New OS for CMA, mobile computing, personal digital assistance, wireless networking need to have: Architectural support- flexible architecture, microkernel architecture.

Resource management support for processor cycles, memory and network bandwidth, for QoS guarantee eg QoS based resource control, real time scheduler, QoS based memory management, timed I/O management. Programming support Proper time management (deadline management) Real-time threads Synchronization

Tool kits Athena Muse (visual computing group) Users interface management system with integrated scripting language called eventscript. Developers can select based on application requirement. Used for hypermedia, simulation, navigation through visual databases etc Organizes related material (text, graphics, video etc) into packages

Quick time used in apple computers Its media independent track model for multimedia data and software only video format that makes low-quality video playback possible without special hardware. It has system software, file format, apple compression, human interface standard. It incorporates- movie toolbox, image compression manager, video compressor.

Teleconferencing systems- has Echo cancellation/suppression Scheduling of conferences Limitation of cost Non standard equipment Dedicated lines Expensive COder/DECoder CODECS

Videophones Affordable Can use existing phones systems Suited for person to persons rather than group meeting

Multisite video conferencing Allows effective teleconferencing for group meeting Can be used for E-learning, meetings etc

Uses optical fibre links Uses star topology, with crossbar switches Four full bandwidth video signal and data carrier are simultaneously transmitted over each fibre thus allowing Five way conferencing

Computer based teleconferencing systems Advances CODEC, network, softwares are the driving force Enable sharing applications ie two or more users can simultaneously edit, modify, review computer based materials of mutual interest Video teleconferencing on the desktop allow for slide presentation, taking notes, updating documents while taking part in a meeting.