Architecture for Varying Multimedia Formats

In recent years, a few transitions in multimedia applications may be observed. We can identify at least two trends. Firstly, multimedia is being introduced in mainstream applications, leaving behind its traditional focus on highly professional markets, and on the gaming enhancement arena. Secondly, standardization bodies continue to work on media standards in order to provide a common approach to enable interoperability, better quality and efficiency under specified constraints. These new media standards are then added to existing archives of media, spanning a broad spectrum of legacy media standards. The result of these two trends is that a typical multimedia application, in order to be effective, needs to support many input types and provide the user with a seamless and transparent behavior. This paper discusses a pragmatic approach to this problem based on the object-oriented paradigm for real-world multimedia applications.