Supporting multimedia in the distributed computing environment

While the performance of general purpose processors and networks continue to increase, human perception capabilities remain static-and expectation of quality only grows slowly. The prospect that digital signal processing tasks will be performed by general purpose processors is very real-we will be moving away from an environment of dedicated, special purpose hardware. This allows us to consider whether applications which integrate various real time media, such as voice and audio, can run in the general purpose distributed computing environment. The author presents some of the experiences from previous work with distributed multimedia, identifies some system requirements and describes the work which is under way to investigate these needs