Audio/Video Messaging for Multiple Devices

This paper describes an infrastructure that supports data transforms and transmissions as part of multimedia communications. The infrastructure is made up of a specialized resource manager - called media flow manager - which creates and manages media flows. A media flow is the movement of a set of data - through a collection of media processing units - from a set of sources to a set of sinks. The paper describes the programming interface presented to applications by the media flow manager and the programming interface between the media flow manager and media processing units. It also describes how the media flow manager is being used to build an audio-video messaging application, and it describes the design and function of a particular media processing unit - a video transcoder - used by the messaging application.