A Network-Transparent, Retained-Mode Multimedia Framework for Linux

Multimedia processing frameworks provide a comprehensive set of tools that greatly simplify the development of multimedia applications. "Traditional" frameworks provide pluggable black-box components that encapsulate different processing steps such as multiplexing or compression. The application is expected to use these building blocks to construct the full processing pipeline containing all individual transformations to be applied to the data. The work presented here proposes a very different approach to multimedia processing: Applications to formulate their media processing intent at a considerably higher level of abstraction, while the framework supplies the necessary infrastructure to dynamically translate these application requests into low-level multimedia processing operations. In contrast to the rather rigid processing pipeline of traditional designs, this translation is fully dynamic. The author introduces a set of extensions to the X window system and demonstrates the elegance of the media processing framework by turning X from a mere network-transparent graphics system into a full-fledged network-transparent multimedia system.