Madeus Overview

Here is a few informations on what you can find on this site.

Here is one of the talks in RTMW96 about Madeus.

Overview and features

Madeus is a simple but powerfull authoring and presentation tool. It offers the basic functions to build and maintain easily and interactively a structured multimedia document.

The first version of Madeus covers the following features :

• Several media types supported : Audio(AU, Mpeg), video(Mpeg), images(gif, jpeg, png ....), formatted text, buttons, ....
• Supports multiple fonts, caracter sizes and forground background colors.
• Web-like time-based hypermedia links (internal, external, cross and inclusion links are supported).
• Streaming protocol over the network using HTTP (TCP-Based).
  Streams are handled progressivly, RTSP is currently under development and evaluation.
• HTML-like and text based mark-up language.
• Some basic features for time-based style (moving object boxes, ...).
• Netscape Plugins compliant API is under integration and works already in the Amaya browser.

Authoring is simply achieved by inserting elements into the document and setting relationships with a palette of Allen's like operators (extended to handle quantitative, causal and indeterministic behaviour), then a big storie of computations is achieved internally to synchronize the document.

One nice thing with madeus is that you can pause the presentation, modify the scenario and then continue the view the document. If the scenario meets the author's intentions it can be saved back to a file. The authoring and presentation shares the same data structures so it is not needed to switch between authoring and presentation environments.

MADEUS is developped in the opera project