Abstract: A multimedia system includes a housing having several shelves for receiving multimedia modules. Each module and each shelf is equipped with a plug connector element. The plug connector elements of the modules and of the shelves are compatible and are preferably designed as plugs and sockets. The plugs and the sockets can be designed in the same way so that each module can be plugged into each shelf, or they can be module-specific so that only a module designed for a particular shelf can be plugged into it. When a module is inserted into the shelf of the housing, the plugs are inserted into one another so that the module is now connected to the first bus line, which connects the plug connector elements of the shelves with one another. Over the second bus line other modules situated outside the housing or the rack can be connected to this first bus line. The first and the second bus line together form a common bus line, which is preferably designed as a ring line.

Abstract: The invention relates to a method of joint data transmission of digital source data and control data between data sources and data sinks which are subscribers of a uni-directionally operated communication network having a ring configuration, in which source data and control data are transmitted in a format which prescribes a clocked sequence of individual bit groups of the same bit width which are transmitted in a continuous data stream, in each case specific bit positions predetermined by the format are reserved, in which the subscribers sample data in each case with a first sampling frequency and the communication network samples data with a second sampling frequency, which is an integral multiple of the first sampling frequency, in which, within each bit group, at least one contiguous region with a predetermined number of bit positions can be reserved for source data and the contiguous region(s) in each case have a beginning and a defined length and are in each case assigned to a subscriber address, in whi