Storing continuous media objects using parallelism with merging

Many new applications are being developed that capitalize on recent advances in multimedia systems. Such systems provide users with access to images, video clips, and audio samples as well as traditional text. A major challenge is to store the data for continuous media such as video and audio in such a way as to guarantee delay-free user input and output. We propose a hybrid solution to this challenge which combines the use of I/O parallelism with merging techniques for continuous media. These parallelism with merging (PWM) techniques outperformed techniques based solely on parallelism in simulation experiments.