Nizza: A Framework for Developing Real-time Streaming Multimedia Applications

Real-time multimedia applications require processing of multiple data streams while maintaining responsiveness. Development of such applications can be greatly accelerated by the use of a middleware framework that abstracts operating system dependencies and provides optimized implementations of frequently used components. In this paper we present the Nizza multimedia framework which enables rapid creation, analysis, and optimization of real-time media applications. Our main goal is to provide a simplified modular design without sacrificing application performance. The framework is based on the dataflow paradigm. An integrated scheduler automates parallelism among the modules and distinguishes between sequential and combinational modules in order to leverage data parallelism. Nizza measures application performance statistics, allowing rapid development of multimedia applications and identification of performance bottlenecks. Our framework is crossplatform and has been used to develop applications on the Windows, Windows Mobile, and Linux operating systems. We present several example applications that were implemented using our framework that demonstrate the performance and usability of Nizza.