Readings in Multimedia Computing and Networking

Introduction to Multimedia Operating Systems

Klara Nahrstedt,     University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign

MULTIMEDIA computing environments are composed of a variety of hard–real-time, soft-real-time and best effort (non-real-time) applications. In order to support the coexistence of these applications, multimedia computing requires a multimedia operating system framework. The reasons are as follows. In the past, two types of operating systems were used for multimedia applications: the general purpose operating system and the real-time operating system. The general purpose operating system serves non-real-time applications best and optimizes its resource management with respect to the throughput of schedulable units. It provides a fair ...