Performance Evaluation of Synchronization Losses in the Continuous Media Toolkit

Abstract

This paper presents a performance analysis of synchronization services provided by the Berkeley Continuous Media Toolkit (CMT). The quality of audio-video synchronization is measured against processor and network loads for both remote and local clients. The metrics of analysis are the perceptible and tolerable human perceptual limits reported by Steinmetz, and another metric designed to measure synchronization of lossy media streams. It is shown that according to Steinmetz' metric CMT provides imperceptible audio-video mis-synchronization for about 10 seconds, and tolerable synchronization for about 13 seconds from the start of the clips for local clients under low processor loads. It is also shown that under high loads, synchronization is achieved at the cost of losing media frames.