Resumen
Recent improvements in microprocessor performance have made possible migration of continuous media processing from specialized hardware, such as decompression and digital signal processing boards, to software. The extensibility and configurability of software libraries allow multimedia applications to access a wider range of multimedia objects, stored in a variety of compressed formats, and to employ an extensible set of tools for processing these objects. Furthermore, configurable software libraries enable applications to take advantage of new audio and video compression standards as they emerge, rather than becoming obsolete. Our implementation has shown how the well-engineered balance between static and dynamic composition can be used to maintain a highly modular, but efficient object-oriented implementation. Moreover, performance gains are achieved by enabling signal processing modules to be inserted at intermediate stages of compression. Given that compression technology is still evolving and presentation processing is a common bottleneck in communications performance, improvements in this area will have a positive impact on the performance and structure of future distributed multimedia applications.