Building heterogeneous distributed multimedia systems

Multimedia computing has emerged as a major area of research. Most of this work has centred on the stand-alone multimedia workstation with a variety of packages now available. The combination of multimedia computing with distributed systems offers even greater potential. However, much less work has been carried out in this area of distributed multimedia systems. This is principally because of the major problems encountered in bringing together the two areas of technology. One of these is heterogeneity. It is likely that most distributed multimedia environments will be heterogeneous, consisting of a number of different workstations interconnected by one or more types of network. Research at Lancaster is focusing on the problem of supporting distributed multimedia computing environments. The paper reports on the results of this research. More specifically, it concentrates on the approach to heterogeneity which has been adopted at Lancaster