MediaWare: a distributed multimedia environment with interoperability

Abstract

MediaWare is a distributed multimedia environment based on state-of-the-art distributed object computing standards as specified by CORBA. MediaWare enhances interoperability among media objects through the interoperable virtual connection protocol. MediaWare provides an infrastructure for building interactive multimedia applications that support synchronized, time-based media in a heterogeneous, distributed environment. This paper discusses MediaWare's architecture and its object life cycle. MediaWare's architecture includes an application layer; a quality-of-connection layer, which is an aggregation of the quality-of-service in addition to the user's interaction and synchronization requirements; an interoperable virtual connection protocol layer; an objects database including the interoperable database layer; an object request broker layer; an interface definition language (IDL) mapping layer; and finally, an object implementation layer. The paper includes examples to show MediaWare's power to generate several multimedia teleorchestrations and scenarios.