this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th international workshop on interactive distributed multimedia systems and telecommunication services, idms97, held in darmstadt, germany, in september 1997. the 41 revised full papers presented in the book were selected from over 100 submissions. the papers are organized in sections on media coding and content processing, development and interoperability, on-demand systems, multicast and fec, video server and systems, video transmission, production and authoring, multimedia applications, mobility, cscw and system performance, mm communication over atm networks, cscw and teleteaching, qos for media presentations, qos and scaling.