This paper presents a unified approach to modeling and implementing temporal multimedia objects. The approach is based on both the object-orientation and the time interval logic investigated by Allen (Alle83). We regard every tempord multimedia data as a time interval. Then, by introducing null time-intervals, it is shown that every temporal relationship is represented using only the equals and the meets relationship. Accordingly, to manipulate heterogeneous temporal multimedia data in a unified manner, normal forms of composite temporal multimedia objects are introduced. The normal forms allow us to implement a multimedia player, where two synchronization schemes are necessary and sufficient to play back any composite temporal object; which are the individual and the start synchronization scheme. These schemes are implemented and evaluation results are shown in this paper. In general, audio-visual data are huge. We adopted MPEG-1 standard to compress video data. A suitable storage structure for MPEG-1 video data is also shown with a class hierarchy.
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