Ubiquitous computing environments on the other hand require systems that allow multimedia content and processing to be flexibly distributed across different devices that are currently available in a network while supporting dynamic migration between devices as users move or requirements change.
This paper concentrates on the two most important operations for dynamic distributed multimedia: combining two flow graphs so that common processing can be shared between them as much as possible, and -- based on this service -- reconfiguring a running multimedia flow graph across a network. We use a number of different application scenarios to motivate the basic middleware requirements including device control and distributed synchronization. Finally, we present two key applications and report on results of an implementation of this approach.