MULTIMEDIA

COMMUNICATIONS
By
Dr. A. ADHISELVAM

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 MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS
• Interpersonal Communications
• Interactive Applications over the Internet
• Entertainment applications

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1.Interpersonal Communications Category
• Interpersonal communications may involve Single type or integrated two
or more type of media
• They are
• Speech only
• Image only
• Text only
• Text and Images
• Speech and Video
• Multimedia

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1.Interpersonal Communications Category
SPEECH ONLY
• Telephony is an example application of speech only
• Service is provided using telephones which are connected either to
PSTN/ISDN/Cellular network or PBX
• Multimedia PC with microphone, speaker, telephone interface card and
software called Computer Telephony Integration allows User make
telephone calls through PC
• Voice mail and Teleconferencing are examples
• Voice-mail- Useful when called person is not available. Spoken message is
stored in voice mail box of the called person. Message can be read owner
of the mailbox when he/she contacts the server
• Teleconference- Calls involve multiple interconnected telephones/PC.
Person can hear and talk to all of others involved in the call is called
teleconference call 4/29
1. Interpersonal Communications Category
IMAGE ONLY
• FAX: Exchange of electronic images of documents over PSTN/ISDN is
known as Facsimile
• Communication involves Pair of FAX machines one at each network
terminal point
• Steps
• Caller keys-in the telephone number of the recipient
• A circuit is set up through the network
• Two fax machines communicate with each other to establish operational parameters
• Sending machine starts to scan and digitize each page of document and is simultaneously
transmitted over the network
• At the receiver side, printed version of image document is produced
• After the last page of document has been sent and received connection through the network is
cleared by the calling machine

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1.Interpersonal Communications Category
IMAGE ONLY
• PC FAX
• PC can be used instead of the normal fax machine to send an electronic
version of document stored within the PC’s memory
• Digital image of each page of doc is sent in the same way by fax
• Terminal at the called side can be either a fax/PC fax.
• With PC fax, send the digitized doc over other network types such as
enterprise network. This needs LAN card and associated software.

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1.Interpersonal Communications Category
TEXT ONLY
• Email is an example
• User terminal is PC or workstation; network is Internet

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1.Interpersonal Communications Category
TEXT and IMAGE
• Computer-supported cooperative Working (CSCW) is
an example of applications involved text and image
• Network used is enterprise network, LAN or internet
• A distributed group of people are all working on same
project from different location.
• User terminal is either PC/WS. A window on each
person’s display is used as shared workspace. This is
known as shared whiteboard.
• Display comprises both text and image.
• CSCW is known as general program (white board) and
linked set of support program (consists two parts
change notification and update control) in each PC.
• Whenever a user of group updates the contents of
his/her whiteboard, change-notification part sends
the changes details to whiteboard program.
• This relays the changes to update-control in each PC
and proceed to update the contents. 8/29
1.Interpersonal Communications Category
SPEECH and VIDEO
• Video telephony is an example

Two-party video telephone call 9/29

1.Interpersonal Communications Category
SPEECH and VIDEO

Videoconferencing using MCU

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1.Interpersonal Communications Category
SPEECH and VIDEO

Videoconferencing using broadcast network

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1.Interpersonal Communications Category
SPEECH and VIDEO

Remote Lecture

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1.Interpersonal Communications Category
Multimedia
• Three examples of Email consisting of other than text
voice-mail
video-mail
multi-media mail

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2. Interactive Applications over Internet
• Internet is used to support a range of interactive applications.
• WWW is an example
• WWW comprises a linked set of multimedia information servers that are
geographically distributed around the Internet. Figure below shows the
general principle

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2.Interactive Applications over Internet
• In WWW, each doc comprises a linked set of pages and linkage between
the pages are known as hyperlinks
• Hyperlinks are pointers (aka references) either to other pages of same
doc or to any other document in WWW.
• Hypertext is used to create a docs consisting only text, whereas
Hypermedia is used to create a docs comprising multimedia data
• There is no central authority for add new documents into the web.
Anyone can create a new doc at particular web server
• Each doc has unique address is known as URL
• The first page of a doc is known as Home page.
• HTML is a simple language to create a doc (web page)
• Net banking, online shopping applications provide customer not only
information but also permit transactions.
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3. Entertainment Applications
•Movie/Video-on-demand
•Interactive Television

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3. Entertainment Applications-
Movie/Video-on-demand
• The video and audio in entertainment applications must be of a much
higher quality/resolution, since wide-screen televisions and stereophonic
sound are often used.
• Digitized movie/video with sound requires a minimum bandwidth of
1.5Mbps.
• Hence the network used to support this application must be either a
PSTN with a high bit rate modem or a cable network.

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3. Entertainment Applications
Movie/Video-on-demand
• The Figure (a) shows the general operating scheme in both cases.

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3. Entertainment Applications
Movie/Video-on-demand
• Information stored on the server is a collection of digitized movies/videos
called Video Server.
• Subscriber terminal comprises a conventional television with a hand-held
device for interaction purposes.
• User interactions are communicated to the server through a set-top box
which also contains the high bit rate modem.
• By use of Suitable menu, subscriber is able to browse set of
movies/videos available and initiate the showing of a selected movie.
This type of application is known as movie-on-demand (MOD) or video-
on demand (VOD).
• In addition, subscriber can control the showing of the movie by using
pause, forward, fast-forward, and so on 19/29
3. Entertainment Applications
Movie/Video-on-demand
• Key feature – a subscriber can initiate the showing of a movie selected a
large library of movies at any time.
• From the figure (b), the server is capable of playing out simultaneously a
large number of video streams equal to number of subscribers currently
watching the a movie.

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3. Entertainment Applications
Movie/Video-on-demand
• If server is supporting a large number of subscribers, it is common for
several subscribers to request the same movie within a short time
interval between each request.
• An alternative mode of operation used in which requests for a particular
movie are not played out immediately but instead are queued until the
start of the next playout time of that movie as shown in Figure (c)below.
• This is known as near movie-on-demand (N-MOD)

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3. Entertainment Applications
Interactive television
• Broadcast television networks include cable, satellite, and terrestrial
networks.
• Basic service of these networks is diffusion of both analog and digital
television (and radio) programs.
• In addition, STB associated with these networks has a modem.
• For cable networks as shown in Figure below (a), STB provides both a low
bit rate connection to the PSTN and a high bit rate connection to the
Internet.

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3. Entertainment Applications
Interactive television
• By connecting appropriate TE to the STB, subscriber is able to gain access
to all the services provided through the PSTN and the Internet.
• In addition through the connection to the PSTN, subscriber is able to
actively respond to the information being broadcast.
• This is the origin of the term interaction television and Typical uses of the
return channel are for voting, participation in games, home shopping,
and so on.
• As in figure (b), similar services are available through satellite and
terrestrial broadcast networks except that the STB associated with these
networks requires a high- speed modem to provide the connections to
the PSTN and the Internet.

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3. Entertainment Applications
Interactive television

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Multimedia Information Representation
• TEXT
Unformatted Text
Formatted Text
Hyper Text

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Unformatted Text
• This enables pages to be created which comprises strings of fixed-length characters from limited set
• Two set of characters that are used to create pages consisting of unformatted text : ASCII Character Set
and Mosaic character set
• ASCII is widely used character sets.
• Each character is represented by a unique 7-bit binary codeword
(Codewords for ‘A’ is 1000001 and 1 is 0110001)
• ASCII includes:
1. Alphabetic, numeric and punctuation characters (printable)
2. Format control character- BS, LF, CR, SP, DEL, ESC, FF 
3. Information separator- FS, RS
4. Transmission control characters- SOH (1), STX, ETX, ACK, SYN, DLE
• Mosaic character set is a supplementary version of ASCII set
• It includes set of mosaic characters and upper case letters
• These set is used to create simple graphic images
• Videotex/teletex is an example of this particular character set
• This application is a general broadcast information services available through a television set 26/29
Formatted Text
• This enables pages to be created which comprises strings of characters of different
font styles, font size, shapes, table, graphics, and heading
• It is produced by most word processing packages
• It is also used extensively in printing press to print books, magazine, journal etc.
• This is also created using HTML
• In the HTML, each page of the document comprises the string of characters, table,
picture with corresponding format –control character sequences inserted at
appropriate places
• Print preview command is used to visualize the layout of each page.
• This is the origin of the term WYSIWYG

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Hyper Text
• This enables an integrated set of documents to be created which have links between
them
• These links are called hyperlinks
• The linked set of pages are accessed and viewed using a client program called web
browser
• A page which is associated with each set of linked pages is known as home page
(main page/index page) of a web site
• URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator which consists unique name of server
computer(web server) and name of the file
• Hypertext Markup Language is an example of markup language
• It is used to describe how contents of a document are to be presented in display
screen or printer.
• Postscript, SGML, TEX, LATEX are other markup languages
• Output of these languages is similar to that produced by word-processing system such
as msword
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HTML
HTML Tag Syntax Example Meaning
<html> <html> … </html> <html> <head> NIT T</head> Root tag of an HTML page
<body> … </body> </html>
<head> <head> …</head> <head> title tags </head> Contains meta information
about the document
<title> <title> …</title> <title> Biodata </title> Specifies a title for a HTML
document
<body> <body>…</body> <body>…<body> Visible page content
<h1> to <h6> <h1> heading </h1> <h1> NIT TRICHY</h1> Define headings.
<h1> most important
heading.<h6> least heading
<hr> <hr> <hr> Define horizontal ruler
<p> <p>… </p> <p> This is a paragraph…. Defines a paragraph. It omits
</p> line break
<br> <br> <br> Defines a line break. Since it
is empty tag, it has no end
tag
<pre> Defines preformatted text. It
preserves both spaces and
line breaks
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