Playout Management - An Integrated Service of a Multimedia Database Management System

* 2 The " Arbeitspapiere der GMD – GMD Technical Reports " primarily comprise preliminary publications, specific partial results and complementary material. In the interest of a subsequent final publication the " Arbeitspapiere/Technical Reports " should not be copied. Critical comments would be appreciated by the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced or further processed in any form or by any means without the prior permission of GMD. All rights reserved. Abstract Playout management subsumes both, lower and higher level system tasks necessary to execute stored multi-media presentations. An elegant way to handle the data management tasks especially for simultaneous multi-media presentations is to use a database management system. Based on an analysis of some alternative solutions for providing a playout management service for multimedia presentations which data are managed by using a database management system, we propose to integrate a playout management service directly into the database management system. This allows for very efficient solutions since the storage, retrieval, buffer-ing, and playout of the multimedia data is handled within one consistent system. The playout management as well as other services of the database management system, such as, e.g., a continuous object management service, can work more optimal by reflecting the specific operation of each other. By introducing the AMOS system which is a distributed, object-oriented multimedia database management system, we show a concrete example for the realization of an integrated playout management service. We also briefly describe an extension toward reactive adaptive playout management aiming at high quality multimedia presentations in spite of contradictory external and system-internal constraints.