A-169 Specifying Loops and Path Selection in Multimedia Presentations.pdf

A-169 Specifying Loops and Path Selection in Multimedia Presentations Robert Cooley, Joseph A. Konstan, Brian Bailey, Moses Dejongfcooley,konstan,bailey,dejongg@Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of Minnesota4-192 EECS Bldg., 200 Union St. SEMinneapolis, MN 55455, USAFebruary 22, 1998AbstractWith the rapid technological advances in computer hardware and presentation devices thatare occurring, the development of multimedia presentations is quickly expanding from the realmof professional studios to small oces and homes. Along with the hardware advances, mucheort has been put into creating the necessary tools to convert raw data streams into polishedpresentations, including the specication of temporal relations between media objects (synchro-nization). Many models have been proposed and implemented for handling a rich set of bothne-grain (e.g. lip-synching an audio le with a video le) and coarse-grain (e.g. requiring objectA to nish before object B starts) synchronization constraints. However, the explicit handlingof loops and selection of one out of many paths within a synchronization model are importantbut often overlooked capabilities. This paper extends an existing coarse-grain synchronizationmodel, the FLexible Interactive Presentation Synchronization (FLIPS) model [SKD96], to addthese capabilities.Keywords: multimedia, synchronization, coarse-grain This work was supported in part by NSF grants EHR-9554517 and IRI-9410470 1 Introduction and BackgroundWith the rapid technological advances in computer hardware and presentation devices that areoccurring, the development of multimedia presentations is quickly expanding from the realm ofprofessional studios to small oces and homes. Aordable camcorders, digital cameras, and CPUswith dedicated multimedia instruction sets are among the products that have emerged withinthe last few years. Along with the hardware advances, much eort has been put into creatingthe software and synchronization tools to conver