The Role of Operating Systems in Object-Oriented Distributed Multimedia Platforms

Considerable progress has been made in the development of technologies to support distributed multimedia computing, but application platforms are needed to make such technology accessible to application programmers. This paper sets out requirements for such platforms and discusses the role of operating systems in object-oriented platform support. We describe an initial approach to providing such a platform which attempted to factor out all realtime aspects of multimedia support onto a hardware based multimedia network interface unit. This solution has been partially successful but lacks the flexibility and level of integration subsequently demanded by application programmers. Our response has been to redesign the multimedia network interface unit, placing more emphasis on the provision of dynamic services which require real-time operating system support. The new design described in this paper exploits and extends features of a distributed object-oriented micro-kernel to provide the necessary system wide support,