Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ucsd!sdcc6!beowulf!bowdidge From: bowdidge@beowulf.ucsd.edu (Robert Bowdidge) Newsgroups: comp.multimedia Subject: Re: test Keywords: There's actually good information after my childish flame... Message-ID: <15616@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> Date: 15 Jan 91 03:41:16 GMT References: <1991Jan14.162055.16075@d.cs.okstate.edu> <1991Jan14.220439.9184@magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu> Sender: news@sdcc6.ucsd.edu Organization: CSE Dept., U.C. San Diego Lines: 157 Nntp-Posting-Host: beowulf.ucsd.edu In article yorkw@stable.ecn.purdue.edu (Willis F York) writes: >tmedona@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Terry E. McDonald) writes: >>Does anyone know what comp.multmedia stands for? >MultiMedia is the "latest" buzzword used by the "Major" computer companys. >(Because they saw that the AMIGA was so cool, and they wanted on the Bandwagon) (In my opinion) > >The Definition eems to be a "program" that incorporates >all forms of information. (Text,Graphs,pictures,sounds,ect..) >and allows a "person" to get to the information easially. > >A good example is i the "Malls" that have the Booths with touch screens >Touch the section/store ya want and see/hear ad's and specials. > >I've seen stores (grocery) that have "Recipe" booths that show ya >foods and give out "recipes". Kinda Neat. >Seems to me Multimedia is "writing computer programs for Idiots" >ie. If it's not understandable WITHOUT thought it's too complex!. >C-ya. Gag... >Macintosh... Proof that a Person can use a Computer all day and still >not know ANYTHING about computers. Back, back, you geeky Amiga hackers! Get away! Out, out! (Well, we've got to start the flame wars early...) Multimedia can be what you do with your Amiga, but it's probably best defined as integrating something other than text into your computer system. Live video, audio, smell (Smell-o-vision 1.0! coming soon!), and holograms all count as possible media that can be integrated into a computer system. You can approach multimedia from the user side by making computers easier to use by making the interfaces more varied, or by moving jobs traditionally done without a computer into the computer age. Current phone switching systems could be called multimedia in this respect. There's also people looking at using computers for digitally editing film and video. You can also approach the topic from the operating system and hardware side by understanding how high-bandwidth media such as digital video and audio can be sent along computer nets in real time without destroying network throughput for less-time-critical data, and designing real time operating systems that can handle the real time guarantees necessary to handle video at real time rates. Some sample papers from academia (with a bias towards operating system support for Multimedia) might be: [Ander89] David Anderson and Robert Wahbe "A Framework for Multimedia Communication in a General-Purpose Distributed System", U.C. Berkeley Technical Report UCB/CSD 89/498, March 31, 1989 Deals mainly with their protocols for multimedia systems which keeps track of the attributes (speed, reliability, security) so that the media only gets the amount of overhead it needs when being sent across the network.. [Arons89] B. Arons, C. Binding, K. Lantz, and C. Schmandt, "The VOX Audio Server", Multimedia '89: 2nd IEEE COMSOC International Multimedia Communications Workshop, Ottowa, Ontario, April 20-23 1989 Creates an audio server model that can run on every processor and control sound objects on that machine -- analogous to X Windows treatment of windows. Makes software and hardware objects for operating on the voice data by creating "LAUDs" -- logical audio devices -- which could be connected together into Complex LAUDs. To create an applicationk, you specify how the building blocks go together. Sound data was stored on each client machine with procedures for migrating sounds over the network. [Binding89] C. Binding, C. Schmandt, K. Lantz and B. Arons, "Workstation Audio and Window-Based Graphics: Similarities and Differences", Technical Report, Olivetti Research Center, January 31, 1989 Discusses an audio server that controls sound objects how a windowing system controls the screen. UsesVOXes. [Calnan87] Roger Calnan, "ISLAND: A Distributed Multimedia System", Globecom Tokyo, 1987 Tokyo, Japan (IEEE Communications Society) 19.7.1 - 19.7.5 Similar to Etherphone. [Forsdick85] H. Forsdick, "Explorations into Real Time Multimedia Conferencing", Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Computer Message Systems, pp. 299-315, IFIP, September 1985 Extensions to Diamond to support conferencing. [Forsdick et. al.84] "Initial Experience with Multimedia Documents in Diamond" Proc. IFIP WG 6.5 Working Conference on Computer Based Message Services, Nottingham England 1-4May, 1984 User interface side of Diamond. [Lantz89] K. Lantz, Collaboration Technology Research at Olivetti Research Center, Olivetti Research Center, 1989 [Leung88] W.H.Leung et.al. "A Set of Operating Systems Mechanisms to support Multi-media Applications", 1988 International Zurich Seminar on Digital Communicationso Connectors to link audio devices (hardware, software) virtual circuits [Ludwig87a] L. Ludwig and D. Dunn, "Laboratory for Emulation and Study of Integrated and Coordinated Media Communication", Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '87, Stowe, VT, August 1987, 283-291 [Ludwig87b] L. Ludwig, "A Threaded/Flow Approach to Reconfigurable Distributed Systems and Service Primitives Architectures", Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '87, Stowe, Vt. August 1987 pp. 306-316 Discusses the "Service Primitives" mentioned in [Ludwig87a]. The scheme is presented with little detail "due to legal and proprietary issues yet to be resolved." [Ludwig87b] [Naffah86] Najah Naffah and Ahmed Karmouch, "Agora -- An Experiment in Multimedia Message Systems", IEEE Computer, May 1986, pp. 56- Similar to Muse paper [Sun89] "Multimedia File System Overview", Sun Microsystems, August 1989 Sun built extensions on top of the Unix filesystem to allow information about the file (description of contents, type of encoding, recording date) in a place apart from the main data. Extensions allow application to work with typed data without actually having to worry about what type of data it is (encoding, compression format, etc.) [Sventek87] J.S. Sventek, "An Architecture supporting Multi-media Integration", IEEE Computer Society Office Automation Symposium, Gaithersburg, MD, 27-29 April 1987, pp 46-56 Introduces idea of connectors, similar to service primitives [Ludwig] and Olivetti's CLAUDs. [Terry88] D. Terry and D. Swinehart, "Managing Stored Voice in the Etherphone System", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 6:1, February 1988 pp. 3-27 Partially integrated systeme for voice communication and storage. Connection is managed by the workstation, but voice data travels over the internet directly to the "Etherphone" where it would be decoded and played back. The system was integrated on a group of heterogeneous machines; all voice based processing was done by sending commands to the Voice Server, the machine responsible for storing and manipulating voice objects. [Thomas85] R. Thomas, H. Forsdick, T. Crowley, R. Schaaf, R. Tomlinson, V. Travers, "Diamond: A Multimedia Message System Built on a Distributed Architecture", IEEE Computer, December 1985, 65-78 Diamond is a multimedia electronic mail project. Voice, graphics, and text are allowed in the message. Single document store -- sound data is stored separately from other data. Hope this helps all of you out there who are interested in Multimedia get your reading lists started! -- Robert Bowdidge bowdidge@cs.ucsd.edu