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Designing distributed multimedia applications raises temporal and spatial synchronization issues related to processing, transport, storage, retrieval and presentation of data, sound, still images and video. Within this framework, the paper aims to de ne a general-purpose multimedia synchronization mechanism, known as the conditional delivery mechanism capable of addressing both intra-and inter-stream synchronization issues. The proposed mechanism, based on the identi cation of causal relations among information units of one or several streams, is designed to ensure that these causal relations, expressed at the user's level, are satis ed when delivering the streams. The conditional delivery mechanism is analyzed in depth and both informal and formal speci cations of the mechanism are provided. The formal speci cation refers to an extension of the standard formal description technique LOTOS (RT-LOTOS for Real-Time LOTOS). Validation results of the conditional delivery mechanism are nally presented for a distance and interactive training application.