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Abstract

The present invention is directed to a system comprising one or more multimedia workstations, a high-speed data network, and one or more multimedia servers and associated multimedia network adapters. The server of the present invention may be implemented to be responsible for almost all data processing functionality, relieving the client workstation of this responsibility, and allowing the workstation to serve instead as a repository for multimedia data. In one embodiment, true color pictures, graphic images, etc. are sent directly by the server to each workstation over a high-speed data network with no processing or encoding. For example, a 640.times.480.times.16 bit/pixel image could be sent at 640.times.480.times.2=614,400 bytes of network data. The workstation client needs to perform no substantive processing on the data in order to display it on a video display. Rather, the workstation needs only to store the data to a local graphics frame buffer. For MPEG data, the client simply receives the raw data and passes it to a hardware decoder on the board, thus avoiding any need for software processing.

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First Claim