Joint synchronization between live and stored media in network environments

This paper considers a networked multimedia application like distance learning in which a tutor distributes a stored video stream to students, and he/she sometimes explains the contents of the stored video with live voice and video streams. We propose a joint synchronization mechanism among the media streams. The mechanism takes advantage of the difference in the features of live and stored media. It makes the buffering time of the stored video stream at the destination longer than that of the live media streams. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the mechanism by experiment. Furthermore, we examine the influence of the buffering time of the stored video stream on performance.