A standard for multimedia middleware

Abstract

Advances in hardware, software, and coding standards for digital media have now made the delivery of multimedia information a standard component of many systems. Unfortunately, the pace of this technological development, coupled with strong commercial competition between leading vendors, has meant that little consensus has emerged over the design of programming Interfaces to allow the creation, manipulation, and presentation of such data. PREMO (PRe- sentation Environments for Multimedia Objects) is a new ISO Standard, to be published in 1998, that defines a middleware framework encompassing synchronization, the management of distributed media resources, and the seamless integration of data and processes from disparate application areas. This paper gives an overview of the concepts underlying PREMO and the approach by which the standard utilizes these concepts to address key aspects of multimedia systems design. © 1998 ACM.