Plugging Graphics into Distributed Multimedia

Advances in hardware, software, and coding standards for digital media have now made the delivery of multimedia information a standard component of many systems. Unfortunately, the pace of this technological development, coupled with strong commercial competition between leading vendors, has meant that little consensus has emerged over the design of programming interfaces to allow the creation, manipulation and presentation of such data. PREMO (PResentation Environments for Multimedia Objects) is a project within the SC24 committee of the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) aimed at developing an API (Application Programmer Interface) for distributed multimedia. This work goes beyond previous SC24 standards such as GKS and PHIGS in combining both synthesised graphics with general digital media. This paper describes the contents of the PREMO standard and explains how the integration of graphics into a general framework for media processing is achieved.