System and method for data streaming and synchronization in multimedia groupware applications

Abstract

A system and method for temporal synchronization of media streams in multimedia collaborative applications (i.e., a multi-user distributed applications used for interaction, both in the synchronous and asynchronous fashion among a group of users) in a wide-area distributed environment. The invention presents two abstractions; event streams and collaboration space, that together provide for coarse-grained temporal synchronization by using separate streams for different media and synchronizing the streams at the client location. VCR-like controls are also provided on groups of components in a collaborative application. The event stream provides many services such as replication, persistence, buffering, reading, and writing to archive. By implementing simple interfaces, existing collaborative applications, media players, and encoders become components that can be used to build complex multimedia collaborative applications. To efficiently implement a seeking function on a data component, the present invention introduces a framework for application-specific updates to a component state.