A multimedia oriented component model

Handling the inter-flow synchronization (e.g. images and sound of a video) in distributed multimedia applications seems to be fundamental. In this paper, we propose a new component model, named OSAGAIA , in order to tackle synchronization between multimedia flows from the source (e.g. media capture) to the destination (e.g. media player). This model is made of two entities. The first one is called "elementary processor" and is used as a runtime environment (container) for multimedia components. The second one is called "conduit" and is used to transport synchronous multimedia flows within the application. To ensure the synchronization within both entities, we sample multimedia flows in order to constitute temporal units and synchronous slices. We test this mechanism with a distributed prototype implemented with Java language using JMF (Java media framework) API and TCP/IP as the network protocol. This prototype shows that synchronization is kept between a non-processed and a processed image flow.