A pre-scheduling mechanism for multimedia presentation synchronization

In general a natural presentation of multimedia objects requires solving many problems such as the process of unformatted data in mass storage and the specification of the temporal relationship among media objects. In particular, it is important for a multimedia presentation system to guarantee the precise presentation time in order to provide the user with meaningful information. In this paper, we design the event prescheduler (EPS), which guarantees the precise presentation time in a single-user multimedia system. The EPS sets the optimal prefetch points (OFPs), and then performs an instant scheduling algorithm and/or a buffer management algorithm to rearrange them. We also design the temporal relation translator (TERT), which translates the relative temporal information into the absolute one. In order to measure the actual presentation time of various scenarios we apply the EPS to the scenarios, and compare the time with that obtained from other scheduling algorithms. The evaluation results show that the EPS reduces the termination delays by an average of 38.5% and prevents the expressive presentation delays.