Intra- and Inter-Stream Synchronization of Stored Multimedia Streams

Multimedia streams such as audio and video impose tight temporal constraints due to their continuous nature. Often, different multimedia streams must be presented in a synchronized way. We introduce a scheme for the continuous and synchronous delivery of distributed stored multimedia streams across a communications network. We propose a protocol for the synchronized playback, compute the buffer requirement, and describe the experimental results of our implementation. The scheme is very general and does not require bounded jitter or synchronized clocks and is able to cope with clock drifts and server drop outs.