With the rapid progress in computer and communication technologies, it has been the era of interactive distributed applications, e.g., news-on-demand and distant learning. The provision of VCR-like interactive functions, e.g., reverse, skip, freeze–restart, and scale, makes multimedia applications more flexible and useful to users. However, since the media bases are located remotely in a distributed multimedia environment, many issues must be solved to provide smooth interactive multimedia presentations to users. Thus, to facilitate the development of distributed multimedia applications, an interactive communication engine that is capable of handling multimedia communication is required. In this paper, we adopt the master–medium-based control schemes to solve related issues that exist in interactive multimedia presentations. These control schemes can be adopted in the communication engine of a distributed multimedia application for processing reverse, skip, freeze–restart, and scale VCR-like interactive functions. Based on the synchronization control schemes, an interactive multimedia communication engine called the visual interactive system (TVIS) is developed on SUN SPARC workstations. TVIS can be used as the multimedia processing kernel of interactive distributed applications.