Multimedia synchronization for live presentation using the N-buffer approach

The demand of bringing multimedia information systems into distributed environments makes multimedia synchronization more difficult. In order to eliminate the side effects which result from delay jitters, we propose a bounded buffer allocation scheme, in which the audio stream adopts the blocking synchronization scheme and the video stream adopts the non-blocking synchronization scheme, for live audio and video presentations in this paper. The forward synchronization schemes are performed to overcome the asynchrony anomalies. Once some anomalies of presentations are detected, a forward re-synchronization scheme is triggered to eliminate the asynchrony anomalies. Neither a global clock nor a feedback mechanism is needed using the proposed method. Based on the proposed method, trade-offs between the presentation qualities and networking resources are mathematically calculated. According to these calculable trade-offs, users can derive their own (acceptable) presentation qualities of live video and live audio media based on their available networking resources.