Panther: an inexpensive and integrated multimedia environment

An inexpensive yet high performance, integrated and comprehensive multimedia environment based on a low-end PC platform has been designed and prototyped. Major components of the environment consist of (1) an add-on real-time video/audio codec board on PC 386/486, (2) the system software package including both the interactive utility programs and libraries for application and tool development under MS Windows and DOS, respectively, (3) a multimedia authoring tool that can be interactively executed to generate multimedia applications, and (4) a multimedia extension to a relational database that supports a SQL-like query interface for multimedia data. The significance of having such a low-cost, high performance, and integrated environment lies in its potential for an easy and large-scale deployment as either a stand-alone system or a multimedia front-end in a networked environment, or for a high-powered multimedia server.<<ETX>>