The global acceptance of the digital medium to carry information (in particular over the WWW) makes common the use and development of multimedia information processing systems. This class of systems is very wide and numerous instances are presented in the relevant literature. A common scheme for such presentation mostly follows the classical scheme of specification, development and test. However, in most cases, the evaluation of these systems is related to each particular system. Our aim here is to abstract the class of multimedia systems in order to present a base framework via which systems could be formally compared. This paper analyzes the construction of such a multimedia benchmark by looking at the system from different angles and inheriting from techniques in related fields. Examples of known multimedia system benchmarks are discussed.