Multimedia presentations comprise various media objects such as text, audio, image, and video that are delivered to users according to certain temporal relationships. In stored multimedia presentations, these temporal relationships are explicitly formulated by the author(s) and stored along with the presentations. However, it is difficult to ensure that these temporal relationships are always strictly preserved in real-time, distributed multimedia presentations. This is due to the fact that various components of the run-time environment such as operating system and network may offer only best effort services, i.e., they may not be able to provide any real-time guarantees. In this paper, we survey the different approaches that can be used for adapting multimedia presentations to handle instances where temporal relationships cannot be preserved in a strict manner. We classify these approaches into three categories and discuss when these categories of adaptations can be used.
B. Prabhakaran