Performance Evaluation of Media Losses in the Continuous Media Toolkit

Abstract

Rapid growth of multimedia systems, and accordingly research in this area requires fast prototyping environments. The Berkeley Continuous Media Toolkit (GMT} is a popular environment that satisfies this need. Form a human user's perspective, in order for multimedia demonstrations to be comprehensible, the number of audio or video frames dropped and the timing delays in the ones that are displayed, need to be kept to a minimum. Therefore, it is important to know the frame dropping characteristics of CMT. In a series of experiments we rnonir.ored tlHi variation of thPse parameters with respect processor and network loads. It was obsprvrd that loads affen ap,gregau· frame drops at lower rates and consecutive frame drops at higher rates. Because at a higher rates a liarge number of consecutive frames are dropped, the ones that are played appear in a more timely manner. As a solution to observed problems, we present some QoS based approaches to control drop and delay parameters.