Considering both, the fact that many multimedia applications need playout management and the benefits of the usage of a multimedia database for these applications, this chapter addresses playout management for multimedia databases. After a description of playout management from a general point of view, we discuss alternative solutions for a framework in which playout management is provided for a multimedia database. A major issue related to this is to identify the components of the entire system and their functionality needed to perform the playout management task. Based on the evaluation of alternative approaches, we motivate that multimedia database management systems should perform the playout management by providing an integrated generic playout management service. As an example, we describe the integrated playout management service of the AMOS system. In distributed multimedia database systems, multimedia presentations are based on a distributed execution of the given presentation specification. The crucial aspect here is the way in which the data to be presented is made locally available at the presentation machine considering given timing constraints. The problem of fluctuating data delivery performance in the absence of end-to-end guaranteed QoS is especially addressed. This includes a proposal for Reactive Playout Management which is targeted at overcomming fluctuations by proper adaptations of the data delivery performance demanded by a multimedia application.

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