An adaptive framework for developing multimedia software components
Edward J. Posnak, R. Greg Lavender, Harrick M. Vin · Communications of the ACM · 1997
Recent improvements in microprocessor performance have made possible the migration of continuous media processing from specialized hardware, such as decompression and digital signal processing boards, to software.The extensibility and configurability of software libraries allow multimedia applications to access a wider range of multimedia objects, stored in a variety of compressed formats, and to employ an extensible set of tools for processing these objects.Furthermore, configurable software libraries enable applications to take advantage of new audio and video compression standards as they emerge, rather than becoming obsolete.Despite these advantages, there are two fundamental problems limiting the success of software libraries for processing digital audio and video: A framework simplifies development by promoting the reuse of code, design patterns, and domain expertise.• Difficulty of developing software components.The task of developing software components (such as media players, Netscape plug-ins, ActiveX controls) that decode and process digital audio and video remains time-consuming and costly, due to the inability to reuse code, design patterns, or domain expertise.Media processing component implementations achieve high performance by tightly coupling the media processing code with the environment-specific code.However, this lack of modularity makes it difficult to factor out reusable code and often results in a "cut and paste'' form of code reuse.Insufficient modularity and information hiding requires each new compo-