Multimedia Systems Technology

5.1 Discrete v continuous media

• Multimedia systems deal with the generation, manipulation,
storage, presentation, and communication of information in
digital form.
• The data may be in a variety of formats: text, graphics, images,
audio, video.

A majority of this data is large and the different media may need
synchro-nisation — the data may have temporal relationships as an
integral property.
• Some media is time independent or static or discrete media:
normal data, text, single images, graphics are examples.
Video, animation and audio are examples of continuous media.

5.2 Analog and Digital Signals

• The world we sense is full of analog signal, electrical sensors
such as transduc-ers, thermocouples, microphones convert
the medium they sense into electrical signals.
• These are usually continuous and still analog. These analog
signals must be converted or digitised into discrete digital
signals that computer can readily deal with.
• Special hardware devices called Analog-to-Digital converters
perform this task.
• For playback Digital-to-Analog must perform a converse operation.
• Note that Text, Graphics and some images are generated directly by
com-puter and do not require digitising:
• they are generated directly in binary format.
 • Handwritten text would have to digitised either by electronic
pen sensing of scanning of paper based form.

5.3 Input Devices and Storage

• Let us now consider each media in turn and summarise how it
may be input into a Multimedia system.
• We also briefly analyse the basic storage requirements for each
type of data.
• We do not yet consider any effect of compression on the files.
Note that storage requirements a large for many forms of media.

5.3.1 Text and Static Data

• The sources of this media are the keyboard, floppies, disks and
tapes.
• Text files are usually stored and input character by character.
Files may contain raw text or formatted text e.g HTML, Rich
Text Format (RTF) or a program language source (C, Pascal,
etc..
• Even though to data medium does not include any temporal
constraints there may be an natural implied sequence e.g. HTML
format sequence, Sequence of C program statements.
• The basic storage of text is 1 byte per character (text or format
character). For other forms of data e.g. Spreadsheet files some
formats may store format as text (with formatting) others may
use binary encoding.
• Even the the storage requirements of this data is never high when
data is stored on disk small files may take larger disk storage
requirements due to block and sector sizes of disk partitions.

5.3.2 Graphics
• Graphics are usually constructed by the composition of primitive
objects such as lines, polygons, circles, curves and arcs. Graphics
are usually generated by a graphics editor program (e.g.
Freehand) or automatically by a program (e.g. Postscript usually
generated this way).
• Graphics are usually editable or revisable (unlike Images).
• Graphics input devices include: keyboard (for text and cursor
control), mouse, trackball or graphics tablet.
• Graphics files may adhere to a graphics standard (OpenGL,
PHIGS, GKS)
• Text may need to stored also.
• Graphics files usually store the primitive assembly and do not
take up a very high overhead.
 5.3.3 Images
•Images are still pictures which (uncompressed) are represented
as a bitmap (a grid of pixels).
• Images may be generated by programs similar to graphics or
animation pro-grams.
• But images may be scanned for photographs or pictures using a
digitalscanner or from a digital camera. Some Video cameras
allow for still image capture also.
•• Colour)
Analog
images
per pixelsources
may
(Grey will require
be stored
Scale, 1 bit digitising.
atColour per
Map)
pixelor(Black
24 Bits
andper
White),
pixel 8(True
Bits
Thus a 512x512 Grey scale image takes up 1/4 Mb, a 512x512 24 bit
image takes 3/4 Mb with no compression.
• This overhead soon increases with image size so compression
is commonly applied

5.3.4 Audio
• Audio signals are continuous analog signals. They are first
captured by a micro-phones and then digitised and store —
usually compressed as CD quality audio requires 16-bit
sampling at 44.1 KHz (There are other audio sampling rates
• So 1 Minute of Mono CD quality audio requires 60 ∗44100
∗2 Bytes which is approximately 5 Mb.

5.3.5 Video
• Analog Video is usually captured by a video camera and then
digitised. There are a variety of video (analog and digital)
formats
• Raw video can be regarded as being a series of single images.
There are typically 25, 30 or 50 frames per second.
• Therefore a 512x512 size monochrome video images take
25*0.25 = 6.25Mb for a minute to store uncompressed.
• Digital video clearly needs to be compressed.

5.4 Output Devices

The output devices for a basic multimedia system include

A High Resolution Colour Monitor

CD Quality Audio Output
Colour Printer
Video Output to save Multimedia presentations to (Analog) Video
Tape, CD-ROM DVD.
Audio Recorder (DAT, DVD, CD-ROM, (Analog) Cassette)

Storage Medium (Hard Disk, Removable Drives, CD-ROM

5.5 Storage Media
Major problems that affect storage media:
 Large volume of date
Real time delivery
Data format
Storage Medium
Retrieval mechanisms

5.5.1 High performance I/O

There are four factors that influence I/O performance:

Data — Data is high volume, maybe continuous and may require

contiguous storage. Direct relationship between size of data and
how long it takes to handle. Compression and also distributed
storage
Data Storage — The strategy for data storage depends of the storage
hard-ware and the nature of the data. The following storage
parameters affect how data is stored:
Storage Capacity
Read and Write Operations of hardware
Unit of transfer of Read and Write
Physical organisation of storage units
Read/Write heads, Cylinders per disk, Tracks per cylinder,
Sectors per Track
Read time
Seek time
Data Transfer — Depend how data generated and written to disk, and in
what sequence it needs to retrieved. Writing/Generation of
Multimedia data is usually sequential e.g. streaming digital
audio/video direct to disk.
Individual data (e.g. audio/video file) usually streamed.
RAID architecture can be employed to accomplish high I/O rates
by ex-ploiting parallel disk access
Operating System Support — Scheduling of processes when I/O is initi-
ated. Time critical operations can adopt special procedures. Direct
disk transfer operations free up CPU/Operating system space.

5.5.2 Basic Storage

Basic storage units have problems dealing with large multimedia data
• Single Hard Drives — SCSI/IDE Drives. So called AV (Audio-
Visual) drives, which avoid thermal recalibration between
read/writes, are suitable for desktop multimedia.
• New drives are fast enough for direct to disk audio and video
capture. But not adequate for commercial/professional Multimedia.
Employed in RAID architectures
• Removable Media — Jaz/Zip Drives, CD-ROM, DVD.
Conventional (dy-ing out?) floppies not adequate due 1.4 Mb
capacity.

• Other media usually ok for backup but usually suffer from worse
performance than single hard drives.

5.5.3 RAID — Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

• This concept of RAID has been developed to fulfill the needs of
current mul-timedia and other data hungry application programs,
and which require fault tolerance to be built into the storage
device.
• Further, techniques of parallel processing are also suitable to
exploiting the benefits of such an arrangement of hard disks.

• Raid technology offers some significant advantages as a storage medium:

i. Affordable alternative to mass storage
ii. High throughput and reliability

The key components of a RAID System are:

Set of disk drives, disk arrays, viewed by user as one or more logical
drives.
 Data may be distributed across drives
Redundancy added in order to allow for disk failure

5.5.5 CD Storage
▪ There a now various formats of CD:
▪ In the beginning, there was CD-DA (Compact Disc-Digital
Audio), or stan-dard music CDs.
▪ CD-DA moved onto CD-ROM when people realized that you
could store a whole bunch of computer data on a 12cm optical
disk (650mb).
▪ CD-ROM drives are simply another kind of digital storage
media for computers, albeit read-only.

▪ CD-I (Compact Disc-Interactive) came next. This is a

consumer electronics format that uses the optical disk in
combination with a computer to provide a home entertainment
system that delivers music, graphics, text, animation, and
video in the living room.
▪ Unlike a CD-ROM drive, a CD-I player is a standalone system
that requires no external computer.
▪ Next came CD-ROM/XA (eXtended Architecture). Now we
go back to computer peripherals - a CD-ROM drive but with
some of the compressed audio capabilities found in a CD-I
player (called ADPCM). This allows interleaving of audio and
other data so that an XA drive can play audio and display
pictures (or other things) simultaneously.
▪ There is special hardware in an XA drive controller to handle
the audio playback. This format came from a desire to inject
some of the features of CD-I back into the professional market.
5.5.6 DVD
• DVD, which stands for Digital Video Disc, Digital Versatile
Disc, or nothing, depending on whom you ask, is the next
generation of optical disc storage technology.
• DVD has become a major new medium for a whole host of
multimedia system:
• DVD aims to encompass home entertainment, computers, and
business information with a single digital format, eventually
replacing audio CD, videotape, laserdisc, CD-ROM, and perhaps
even video game cartridges.
• It’s important to understand the difference between DVD-Video
and DVD-ROM. DVD-Video (often simply called DVD) holds
video programs and is played in a DVD player hooked up to a
TV.
• DVD-ROM holds computer data and is read by a DVD-ROM
drive hooked up to a computer. The difference is similar to that
between Audio CD and CD-ROM. DVD-ROM also includes
What are the disadvantages of DVD?
Despite several positive attributes mentioned there are some potential
disadvantages of DVD:
It will take years for movies and software to become widely available.
It can’t record (yet).
It has built-in copy protection and regional lockout.
It uses digital compression. Poorly compressed audio or video
may be blocky, fuzzy, harsh,
or vague.
The audio downmix process for stereo/Dolby Surround can
reduce dy-namic range.
It doesn’t fully support HDTV.
Some DVD players and drives may not be able to read CD-Rs.
First-generation DVD players and drives can’t read DVD-RAM discs.
Current players can’t play in reverse at normal speed.