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From: staehli@ogicse.cse.ogi.edu (Richard Staehli)
Newsgroups: comp.multimedia
Subject: hiding storage latency in multimedia presentations
Message-ID: <21771@ogicse.ogi.edu>
Date: 22 May 91 22:55:49 GMT
Sender: staehli@ogicse.ogi.edu
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Organization: Oregon Graduate Institute (formerly OGC), Beaverton, OR
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Can anyone give me some references for multimedia presentation systems
which hide the latency of storage accesses?  What I'm interested in are 
systems which allow synchronization between separate data presentation
events while tolerating a wide latitude of access latencies.  For example,
if one stream of video data is to begin its presentation simultaneously
with the end of another, is there a system which anticipates the access
latency for the second video to allow precise synchronization?

I have already completed an initial investigation into this problem and
intend to pursue the development of storage server which prefetches data
according to a presentation script.  The intent is to extend location
transparency to latency transparency for real-time data access.  I have 
not found any systems which address this problem for the general case
where data streams may be stored in slow-access devices such as optical
disk juke boxes or distributed over a network.

What I can share is an extensive bibliography (~300 refs.) on multimedia
computing, and perhaps a summary of the responses that I receive.

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.


Richard Staehli
Oregon Graduate Institute
19600 N.W. von Neumann Drive, Beaverton, OR 97006-1999
internet: staehli@cse.ogi.edu    phone: (503) 690-1009