What we need is what the browsers have: the ability to dynamically plug in the code to handle a new data type. Right now, Microsoft’s Audio Compression Manager provides services for compression and decrompresion. Even better would be an architecture that allows all kinds of media processing and control to be done via dynamic objects.

The Continuous Media Toolkit from UC Berkeley (http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/projects/cmt/index.html) will shortly have this dynamic capability running under Unix and Windows NT Microsoft will soon release ActiveMovie. ActiveMovie is an architecture for the control and processing of multimedia streams. ActiveMovie defines how streams of time-stamped multimedia can be controlled and processed by using objects (called filters) connected in a configuration (called a filter graph). For more information about ActiveMovie see http://www.microsoft.com/MEDIADEV/VIDEO/ACTIVMOV.HTM.