A guided tour of multimedia systems and applications

Multimedia, as applied in computer systems, is generally understood to mean the integration of digital audio and full motion video in addition to the more traditional data types, such as text, graphics, animation, and still images. This book looks into the goal of fully integrating both audio and video so that they can be created, edited, and combined with other data types to form compound objects. Now computers can provide sensory rich and engaging forms of interaction that have the potential for increasing users' understanding and retention and enhancing numerous existing applications, as well as facilitating some new ones. This book presents a representative collection of papers that explore the techniques, standards, and applications behind today's advances in multimedia systems. The five papers in the first chapter provide an overview of the basic principles involved in multimedia technology and applications. The next chapter includes seven papers on multimedia compression techniques and standards. The last three chapters consist of a total of 24 papers covering multimedia communication and synchronization, storage and retrieval, and tools and applications.