Synchronization of video in distributed computing systems

A distributed multimedia computing system consists of sources, processing units and presentation devices in which each component operates autonomously (see Figure 1). This independency can be exploited for optimization of individual component performance. Flexibility in performance improvement is enhanced by using independent clock domains. This paper presents a Video I/O model for such a multimedia system. This model provides an asynchronous communication interface for independent clock domains with the ability to synchronize a video display to one of the video sources. The communication interface has been used for the design of I/O modules in a multimedia system, which are briefly outlined.