Experiences with building a continuous media application on Real-Time Mach

Real-time system and continuous media system researchers have worked in areas that are considered by each to be unrelated to the other's domain although continuous media system researchers agree with the effectiveness of real-time technologies on continuous media systems. Media control techniques for improving the smoothness of continuous media such as jitter control and inter-stream synchronization schemes are developed for smoothing continuous media streams running on traditional timesharing operating systems. On the other hand, real-time system researchers show the effectiveness of real-time technologies for satisfying timing constraints of the continuous media. However, there is no report to showing the effectiveness of real-time technologies for the media control techniques. This paper describes experiences with building a continuous media application on Real-Time Mach. First, we present the structure of our distributed video player, called QtPlay, and its media control techniques for smoothing continuous media streams, then we show the effectiveness of real-time technologies for the media control techniques.