SWE 423: Multimedia Systems Chapter 1: Introduction

What constitutes Multimedia Multimedia involves several major industries – computing – telecommunications – publishing – consumer audio-video – electronics – television/movie/broadcasting

Brief History of Multimedia Systems YearEvents prior industrial Revolution Late 1890sRadio was introduced Early 1900sMovie was introduced 1940sTelevision was introduced 1960sConcept of hypertext systems was developed Early 1980sPersonal computer was introduced 1980-presentSeveral digital audio, image, and video coding standards have been developed. 1983Internet is born, TCP/IP protocol was established. Audio CD was introduced. 1990Tim Berners-Lee proposed the WWW. HTML was developed presentSeveral Web browsers, hypertext languages were developed. Mid 1990sHigh Definition Television standard was established.

Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator (ENIAC) Built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors –On the premise of replacing all computers! Women employed calculating the firing tables for the army's artillery guns Filled a  6 by 12 meter room, weighed 30 tons! A “Female Computer”: “I was astounded that it took all this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000”

To perform on ENIAC you had to rearrange a large number of patch cords and then locate three particular knobs on that vast wall of knobs and set them to 3, 1, and 4 Circumference = 3.14 * diameter

Multimedia is still at its infancy Cannot avoid fuzziness in scope, multiplicity of definitions and non- stabilized terminology.

Great Impact of Multimedia Integrating all media in the computer allows using the existing computer power to represent information interactively. This can, also, be transmitted over computer networks.

Interdisciplinary Aspects of Multimedia Telecommunication industry Consumer electronics industry TV and radio broadcasting sector “Publishing” industry

Multimedia Highlights Compression Graphics & Images Audio Computer Architecture AnimationVideo Basics Optical StorageQuality of Service DatabasesProgramming Media ServerOperating SystemsComunication Networks Systems Content Analysis DocumentsSecuritySemanticsSynchro nization Group Comm. Services DesignLearning User Interface Applications Usage

At last: Multimedia Systems operating on multiple modalities: text, audio, images, drawings, animation, video etc. –Some would like to restrict it to systems that simultaneously operate on more than one modalities. Others are more forgiving. Audio/video vs video Sychronizing multiple modalities is important and hard

Example Multimedia Applications Video teleconferencing, distributed lectures, telemedicine, tele symphony White board, collaborative document editing Augmented reality DVDs, digital movies, VOIP telephony (Vonage, Skype) … Networked games Video on demand (from cable TV, satellite etc.), IPTV (AT&T U-verse) Can you think of more applications? YouTube.com, founded in Feb 2005 –Every minute, 10 hours of video is uploaded

Characteristics of Multimedia Depends on the usage model. Streaming movies different than downloading movies –Watching videos in Bluray different than IPTV Objects are large High timing constraints – inter and intra media –TV frames refreshed every 30 frames. Audio synched with video with tight tolerances –MMORG games – if you shoot your opponent first, the opponent should die Media for human consumption can exploit aspects of human cognition to achieve good performance (vs media for processing – face recognition) –We can see changes in brightness better than changes in color

What areas does Multimedia touch Multimedia application touches on most of the fun components: games, movies etc. Multimedia require technologies from across CS, arts etc. Networks and Operating Systems: Media objects have real time constraints, objects are large –OS scheduling, storage system design, data block placement, network management, routing, security etc. Multimedia coding: Content analysis, retrieval, compression, processing and security Multimedia tools, end systems and applications: Hypermedia systems, user interfaces, authoring systems …