What is multimedia?

Moving images, audio, video, text content, put them together and you get multimedia. Our own life is an experience in multimedia, so to speak. We listen, we see, we touch, all these contribute to understanding the world around us. Which is what multimedia is for, to enable people to understand and learn and to make it enjoyable while learning. You see multimedia kiosks, multimedia CDROMS with tutorials and flashy video, they make learning more fun.

What can multimedia do?

It can simulate reality, using a 3D program for example you can visualise a house, it can enable you to see / hear your friend from the other side of the world via streaming technology. See those cool animation effects in movies nowadays? Those are done with a multimedia workstations. That is the power of multimedia.

Requirements of multimedia

Multimedia demands a lot from the average computer. For example, to play full screen video smoothly, you'll need a fast video card, a fast hard drive, a powerful processor and a flicker free monitor. To capture video, you'll need a fast hard drive, a fast capture card and of course a powerful processor. To render a 3d image? Same requirements. Basically, every component has to be top notch! If all you do is run Office applications, you do not require a powerful computer, but for multimedia, only the best will do.

Multimedia technologies

Because the computer has to process so much information at any time, compression is essential for multimedia. Compression will usually result in a loss of quality but that is inevitable. (Though there are formats which minimise on that, and still produce acceptable quality.)

For example a full screen 24-bit video will take up hundreds of megabytes PER second, and there's no way any computer can process that much information to date. So in order to process that video, it is first compressed, and then as it is played back by the user, it is decompressed accordingly using the compression codec. (Compressor/Decompressor) Images have to be compressed as well, to save disk space, as well as requiring less processing power. Even sound. The best example would be the now popular MP3 format. If CD quality music were 44 megabytes in size for each music track, would you download consider downloading it? Think not! Yep compression saves disk space and downloading time. Especially for multimedia over the Internet, compression is essential. RealAudio, QuickTime, Microsoft, etc each of them have their own compression technologies.

That wraps it up, I hope I have given you a good headstart in what multimedia is all about.