Playout management-an integrated service of a multimedia database management system

Playout management subsumes lower and higher level system tasks necessary to execute stored multimedia presentations. For multimedia database management systems, we propose the integration of a respective playout management service. On one hand, this provides optimal database management support for multimedia applications. On the other, this makes the handling of multimedia data within a multimedia database management system more efficient since the storage, retrieval, buffering, and playout management is performed by one consistent system. As an example, we introduce the integrated playout management service of the AMOS system, a distributed object-oriented multimedia database management system. An extension toward reactive adaptive playout management making the multimedia database management system able to overcome insufficient system performance while realizing multimedia presentations is also briefly discussed.