A new approach to collaborative real-time Internet multimedia applications

Internet multimedia conferencing applications have traditionally used a separate tool approach. In contrast, this paper presents a framework for media-engines to facilitate inter-media integration, without introducing undue performance compromises. This work represents a general trend away from individual media tools that are difficult to integrate, and monolithic application software that is difficult to re-use. Instead, a framework is investigated that provides efficient real-time inter-media communication and remote media engine control. Intra-media reconfiguration and abstraction of certain key interfaces (such as compression algorithm and hardware interfaces) is investigated in the context of composable object tool-kits, although our framework allows easy integration of engines structured in any way, and using any language. We focus here on a video engine, written to be reconfigurable, and analyse the performance impact results of adopting a framework approach.