Impact of Steinmetz’ Synchronization Work on Multimedia Community

Digital multimedia systems would not have been successful without understanding synchronization and they would not have been able to compete with analog television and radio quality if digital media such as audio and video would not have been properly synchronized. When first digital multimedia systems emerged in 1980th, it was not clear (a) what the delay thresholds should be to lip-synchronize the various media, (b) what the hardware-software frameworks should be to achieve synchronization goals, known from analog TV and radio, (c) what new synchronization primitives and protocols we need besides mutexes and semaphores to synchronize multiple modalities in multimedia systems. The in-depth answers to these questions were formulated by Ralf Steinmetz and his collaborators in the early 1990s. In his early synchronization work we find many fundamental solutions on which current multimedia systems relied in the past and rely even today. In this paper, we will first explain the early synchronization results from Steinmetz’ work and then show examples of the impact that his synchronization work had on the multimedia community.