MultiSync: a synchronization model for multimedia systems

Synchronization among various media sources is one of the most important issues in multimedia communications and various audio/video (A/V) applications. For continuous playback (such as lip synchronization) under a time-sharing multiprocessing operating system (such as UNIX), the synchronization quality of traditional synchronization mechanisms employed on single processes may vary according to the workload of the system. When the system encounters an overload situation, the synchronization usually fails and, even worse, results in two fatal defects in human perception: the audio discontinuity (audio break) and the out-of-synchronization (synchronization anomaly). In order to overcome these problems, a novel media synchronization model employed on multiple processes (or threads) in a multiprocessing environment is proposed. The problem of asynchronism due to system overload is solved by assigning a higher priority to more important media and adopting a delay-or-drop policy to treat the lower priority ones. Some experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed model and the implementation mechanisms under a UNIX, X-Windows environment. On the basis of the proposed model, a continuous media playback (CMP) module, which acted as the key component of some popular multimedia systems such as multimedia authoring system, multimedia E-mail system, multimedia bulletin board system (BBS), and video-on-demand (VoD) System, was implemented