Coordinating Heterogeneous Time-Based Media Between Independent Applications

This report discusses the requirements and design of an event scheduler that facilitates the synchronization of independent, heterogeneous media streams. The work is motivated by the synchronization requirements of multiple, periodic, logically independent auditory streams, but extends naturally to include time-based media of arbitrary type. The scheduler design creates a framework within which existing synchronization techniques are composed to coordinate the presentation activities of cooperating or independent application programs. The scheduler is especially effective for the presentation of repetitive sequences, and guarantees long term synchronization with a hardware clock, even when scheduler capacity is temporarily exceeded on platforms lacking real time system support. The implementations of the scheduler and of several application programs, class libraries and other tools designed to use or support it are described in detail.