Continuous media playback and jitter control

The purpose of this paper is to examine problems associated with display (playback) of live continuous media under varying conditions for an internetwork of workstations running a general purpose operating system such as Unix. Under the assumption that the network cannot guarantee the required bounds on delay and jitter, there is a need to accommodate the delay jitter in the end systems. Various methods of jitter smoothing at the end systems and their suitability to audio as well as video transmission are discussed. An experimental testbed used to investigate these problems is described. Some initial empirical results obtained using this testbed are also presented.