Managing the Complexity

As graphically illustrated in the previous chapter, time-based media is a broad category encompassing not only different types of media (for example, audio and video), but also different content types (for example, QuickTime and AVI), and different formats for compression (for example, MPEG and Cinepak). This leads to a plethora of diverse media that differ at the conceptual level (visual or aural) down to the bit sequence by which they are encoded. Further complexity is added by the multitude of hardware devices from which media can be captured, and to which it can be rendered.

On the other hand, the goal of the JMF is to present a uniform, platform independent interface to controlling, processing, capturing, and rendering ...

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