The fast-emerging field of multimedia communications involves the use of various media types - text, images, speech, audio, and video in a wide range of subject areas. The book presents these subject areas in-depth that enables the reader to build up a thorough understanding of the technical issues associated with this rapidly evolving subject.The book begins with goals, objectives and characteristics of multimedia, multimedia building blocks, multimedia architecture, distributed multimedia applications streaming technologies, multimedia database systems, multimedia authoring tools, and applications. It describes image and audio fundamentals and their file formats, image compression, and audio compression techniques. It also describes video signal formats, video transmission standards, and video file formats.It also explains types of animations, principles of animation, animation techniques, and introduces OpenGL primitives, shadowing techniques, and rendering.The book also covers advanced multimedia topics such as virtual reality, multimedia communication, multimedia networking, quality data transmission, and multimedia in Android.