An architecture to assist multimedia application authors and presentation engine developers

This paper presents an architecture for monitoring the presentation of multimedia declarative applications, providing feedback about variables states, object properties, media presentation times, among others. Monitoring tools that follow the proposed architecture are able to detect if visual problems are being caused by programming errors or by player malfunctioning. The architecture presents a communication protocol designed to be independent of the declarative language used in the development of multimedia applications. The main goal is to provide an open and generic architecture that can assist multimedia application authors and presentation engine developers. As an example of the architecture use, the paper also presents a monitoring tool integrated into a graphical user interface developed for the ITU-T reference implementation of the Ginga-NCL middleware.