Digital Technical Journal, Volume 5, Number 2 ... - 1000 BiT

I Editor5 IntroductionJane C. Blake~Vunqqing EditorThis issue of the Digital TechnicalJotrr~zal featurespapers on multimetlia technologies ant1 applications,and on uses of the Application ControlArchitecture (ACA), Digital's implementation of theObject Management Group's CORHA specification.The high quality of today's television, film, andsound recordings have set expectations for computer-basedmultimedia; we expect high-qualityimages, fast response times, good quality audio,availability-including network transmission, andall at "reasonable" cost. Bob Ulichney has writtenabout video image-rendering methotls that are it1fact fast, simple, and inexpensive to implement. Hereviews a color rendering system and conlparestechniques that address the problem of insufficientcolors for displaying video images. Dithering is oneof these techniques, and he describes a new algorithmwhich provides good quality color and highspeedimage rendering.The dithering algorithm is utilizetl in SoftwareMotion Pictures. SIMP is a method for generatingdigital video on desktop systems without the needfor expensive decompression hardware. BurkhardNeidecker-Lutz and Bob Ulichney tliscuss issuesencountered in designing portable vitleo compressionsoftware to display digital video on a range ofdisplay types. SMP has been ported to Alph;~ AXP,Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packartl, and Microsoft platforms.Digitized data-video or audio-must be compressedfor efficient storage and transmission.Davis Pan surveys audio compression techniques,beginning with analog-to-digital conversion anddata compression. He then discusses the MotionPicture Experts audio algorithm and the interestingproblem of tleveloping ;I real-time software implementationof this algorithm.Even conipressctl, digitizetl data takes up tremendousm mounts of storage space. A relationaldatabase can not only store this data but providefast retrieval. Mark Riley, Jay Feenan, John Janosik,and T.K. Rengarajan describe DEC Rdb enhancementsthat support multimedia objects, i.e., text,still frame images, compountl documents, andbinary large objects.Managing image documents is the subject of apaper by Jan te Kiefte, Bob Hasenaar, Joop Mevius,and Theo van Hunnik. Megadoc is a hartlware andsoftware framework for building custon~ized imagemanagement applications quickly and at low cost.They describe the UNIX file system interface to\VOliM tlrives, a storage manager, ant1 ;In image;~pplication framework.Distributing multimedia over a network presentsboth engineering challenges and opportunities forapplications. DE