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Multimedia is the integration of more than one communicating medium. It is the use
of words, sounds, still and moving pictures for use in business presentations, training
and education, information delivery, sales and merchandising, and/or entertainment.
The most basic level of multimedia might include a slide presentation with
background music or narration. Up the scale might be a presentation created with an
authoring program; this may contain simple animation and transitions between
visuals. More advanced levels of multimedia may include animation sequences, video
clips, sound, and digitized still images captured from a video camera or scanner.
Multimedia productions can be linear like a television program, but the most
advanced multimedia productions are non-linear and interactive. The desktop
computer, with the ability to represent any and all media, is the driving force behind
the current media revolution involving multimedia, a combination of text, pictures,
sound, moving pictures, animation and interactive buttons within a computer
interface.
Multimedia has become the generic term for "multimedia computing" or "interactive
multimedia." The computer and software are tools for navigating through the media.
The user interacts with the computer, setting the pace and branching to different
topics and areas of interest.
By the end of the 1980s, multimedia hardware technology for the PC was available
and quickly becoming affordable. A legitimate multimedia market, however, was
very slow to take shape. With no assurance that their products would work on the
various proprietary hardware platforms, software developers had little incentive to
produce multimedia titles. Multimedia technology lacked a critical element necessary
to attract significant software investment: standardization.
Macintosh computers have been equipped with multimedia capabilities for some
time, so Mac users have fewer problems and utilities to be concerned about. PCs, on
the other hand, have required additional utilities, such as sound cards, drivers, data
compression software, players and viewers.
The MPC Specification, a minimum set of specifications for multimedia products or
multimedia systems, was developed in 1990 as a result of a collaboration of many
industry companies. This group, the Multimedia PC Marketing Council, established
the MPC certification to serve as a baseline standard for the implementation of
multimedia as an extension of the PC standard.
MPC Specifications have been accepted around the world as the standard for the
hardware implementation of multimedia on the PC. These specifications evolved
from the MPC Level 1 (MPC1), which specified a 386PC with 2 MB of RAM and 30
MB hard drive, to MPC Level 2 (MPC2), a 486PC or higher with at least 4MB of
RAM and at least 160 MB hard drive, to MPC Level 3 (MPC3), which does not
replace MPC1 and MPC2 specifications, but defines an updated platform suitable for
delivering enhanced multimedia functionality. A multimedia PC which meets some
but not all of the Level 3 specifications is considered an MPC Level 2 computer.
A full Multimedia PC Level 3 system requires the following elements and
components:
• CPU
• RAM
• Hard Drive
• Floppy Drive
• CD-ROM Drive
• Audio
• Graphics Performance
• Video Playback
• User Input
• I/O
• System Software
A multimedia PC may be purchased as a pre-configured system, or, if a current PC
meets system requirements as described in the MPC Specifications, it can be
upgraded to MPC2 or 3 with the purchase of an upgrade kit, or by adding individual
CD-ROM drives and sound cards which meet the specifications. A Multimedia PC
Level 3 Upgrade Kit requires the following elements and components:
• CD-ROM Drive
• Audio
• I/O
• (System software may or may not be provided.)

An MPC seal or logo is affixed to products that meet specification levels. Software
bearing the seal is designed to work on a system, upgrade kit, CD-ROM drive or
sound card that meets the MPC Specification.
Because the MPC standard defines a multimedia platform that software companies
can rely on, multimedia software development has grown quickly over the past
several years. The list of available or announced Multimedia PC software products
already includes over 600 titles and applications from 150 software companies.
Multimedia PC titles include whole reference libraries with photos, drawings,
animations, video and sound; language-instruction titles with spoken lessons and
pronunciations; interactive children's titles with animations, and sounds; and utilities
that enable users to construct their own multimedia creations. There is an MPC Titles
Catalog available which displays each vendor ‫ص‬s software along with a description,
market positioning statement, contact information and full-color graphics.
The Multimedia PC Marketing Council and the Software Publishers Association
(SPA) have entered into an agreement that transfers oversight of the MPC
Specification to the SPA. The Multimedia PC Marketing Council is now known as
the Multimedia PC Working Group, and is open to any member of the SPA and to
non-SPA multimedia hardware vendors.
In using a PC for multimedia, software is a necessary consideration. A device driver
acts as an interpreter between hardware and software; for each type of multimedia file
played a driver is needed. If a driver cannot read a file many times software called a
player or a viewer can be downloaded in order to work a multimedia file. Files used
for creating and playing multimedia files and CDs include Media Player, Sound
Recorder and Object Packager.
Many multimedia are compressed since, if not compressed, would require excessive
memory for transmission and storage. Compressed files that have a particular file
format such as .ZIP or .SIT extensions will expand into multimedia file formats with
extensions such as .AVI, .MOV, .WAV or .MID that drivers will recognize.
In using multimedia it is necessary to understand different types of file formats. Some
of the most common types of formats used for sound files include:
• WAV--a digital sound file for Windows
• MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)--files created by connecting a
computer to musical instruments and control devices
• Real-Time Audio (a recent addition to online multimedia)-- supercompressed,
digital, audio information that is sent in its entirety from a server directly to a
user
Playing full-frame, full-motion video straight from a video source would create a 27
Megabyte-per-second data stream, far beyond the capabilities of desktop computers.
An answer to this problem is data compression, using codecs--algorithms developed
to compress and decompress digital video. Codecs such as Motion- JPEG and MPEG
remove redundant data within a single video frame or remove entire frames, then re-
create them on playback from the data in the remaining frames.
Popular video files include:
• QuickTime (.MOV)
• Video for Windows (.AVI)
Two types of files used with still images are:
• JPEG--designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale images of
realistic scenes
• GIF--designed for compressing images with only a few distinct colors such as
line drawings and simple cartoons
There has been much research on cognitive skills and human-computer interface. The
academic community has developed, tested, and refined the technology of
multimedia, and multimedia has made its way into homes. Interest in multimedia
software is high and with the emergence of new authoring tools, all ages are engaged
in developing multimedia programs. Every day more instructional programs and
more tools for graphics and authoring are released, and as products improve
expectations rise.
Multimedia will continue to impact teaching and learning. Interactive multimedia has
great potential as an educational tool. According to Computer Technology Research,
comprehension is raised to some 80% when one sees, hears and interacts with
instructional material. For just sight or just sound, comprehension is 20 to 30%, and
for audio/visual alone, 50%.
With the debut of Mosaic and now, Netscape and other World Wide Web browsers
with a cast of thousands and an audience of millions, multimedia is a global entity.
Full-blown musicals will soon be possible, along with pages with the look and feel of
desktop publishing. Three-D graphics and shared 3-D environments will be standard
as will online presentations and training-on-demand.
Key technologies such as display, MPEG compression, audio and CPUs are
advancing at such a rate that as soon as what seems to be current information is
written, it is dated. Since digital video and audio require large amounts of memory,
major technological advances are bringing closer the ideal multimedia storage which
would combine, for little cost, the transfer rates and random access of a hard drive
with the sturdiness and universal acceptance of a floppy disk. Multimedia is now
portable; laptops equipped with CD-ROM drives are in the marketplace containing
integrated systems which means that CD-ROM and speakers are built into notebooks.
The forecast seems to be that multimedia will melt into the background of daily
living; it will be natural part of living, working, recreating and communicating.
Additional sources concerning multimedia.
Multimedia and Education
The multimedia systems being introduced in American schools today are seemingly
light years from the primers once used to teach the 3Rs. Fascinated by the unleashed
potential of computer technology in education, school boards and parents are united
in the opinion that more is better. However, more is better only if technology
becomes an integral part of the teaching process and thus enhances the quality of
education. Teachers shouldn't be forced to change daily curriculum just for the
purpose of using technology. Any time there is a change, whether it is technological
or simply in a teaching technique, it should not be imposed, but integrated into the
teaching process.
For multimedia to enhance curriculum, it must be woven into the fabric of everyday
life at our schools. Then we can say that technology is being put to good use.
Multimedia should simply augment the instruction process each day. It can never
replace the importance of the teacher instructing class. When some teachers can be
responsible for nearly 200 students each day, the prospect of re-casting and
rethinking their teaching format simply to accommodate new technology is
contradictory to the fundamentals of good teaching.
Care must be taken to keep the essence of what is being taught in the curriculum.
When school districts and the teachers they employ sit down to ponder the purchase
of multimedia today, they need to consider the basic premise that technology must
integrate and enhance how the teacher actually works in the classroom.
According to Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media lab founder and director, multimedia
is the "slayer of boredom, seducer of the senses, and arch nemesis of the 'been there,
done that' attitude." Multimedia is indeed more interactive and more dynamic than
print, but today's students must be equipped with both the basics and new sets of
skills, capable of understanding and dealing with the emerging information-rich
society. Good multimedia instructional material must recognize, promote and
enhance the interaction between student and teacher. Meanwhile, the teacher remains
the indispensable element. Her/his ability to look students in the eye every day while
reviewing lessons is something that should never change.
MPEG
MPEG (pronounced m-peg) stands for Motion Pictures Experts Group. MPEG is a
group of people that meet under ISO (the International Standards Organization) to
generate standards for digital video (sequences of images in time) and audio
compression. In particular, they define a compressed bit stream, which implicitly
defines a decompressor. However, the compression algorithms are up to the
individual manufacturers, and that is where proprietary advantage is obtained within
the scope of a publicly available international standards. MPEG meets roughly four
times a year for roughly a week each time. In between meetings, a great deal of work
is done by the members, so it doesn't all happen at the meetings. The work is
organized and planned at the meetings.
MPEG can compress to a bitstream of 32 kbit/s to 384 kbit/s (Layer II). A raw PCM
audio bitstream is about 705kbit/s so this gives a maximum compression ratio of
about 22. Normal compression ratio is more like 1:6 or 1:7. If one thinks that this is
not much, one must remember that unlike video there is no perceivable quality loss
here. Ninety six kbit/s is considered transparent for most practical purposes. This
means that one will not notice any difference between the original and the
compressed signal for rock 'n roll or popular music. For more demanding works like
piano concerts and the like 128kbit/s will be needed.
JPEG
JPEG (pronounced jay-peg) is a standardized image compression mechanism JPEG
stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the original name of the committee that
wrote the standard. JPEG is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale
images of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic
artwork, and similar material, not so well on lettering, simple cartoons, or line
drawings. JPEG handles only still images.
JPEG is "lossy," meaning that the decompressed image isn't quite the same as the one
started with. (There are lossless image compression algorithms, but JPEG achieves
much greater compression than is possible with lossless methods.) JPEG is designed
to exploit known limitations of the human eye, notably the fact that small color
changes are perceived less accurately than small changes in brightness. Thus, JPEG is
intended for compressing images that will be looked at by humans. If one plans to
machine-analyze images, the small errors introduced by JPEG may be a problem,
even if they are invisible to the eye.
A useful property of JPEG is that the degree of lossiness can be varied by adjusting
compression parameters. This means that the image maker can trade off file size
against output image quality. One can make extremely small files if one does not
mind poor quality; this is useful for applications like indexing image archives.
Conversely, if one isn't happy with the output quality at the default compression
setting, one can jack up the quality until satisfied, and accept lesser compression.
Another important aspect of JPEG is that decoders can trade off decoding speed
against image quality, by using fast but inaccurate approximation to the required
calculations. Until recently, most publicly available JPEG code has adopted a best-
possible-quality philosophy. However, now there are viewers that give up some
image quality in order to obtain significant speedups.
GIF
GIF is an image format widely used on Usenet. GIF can only store 8 bits/pixel (256
or fewer colors). GIF is reasonably well matched to inexpensive computer displays---
those that can display no more than 256 distinct colors at once. But full-color
hardware is getting cheaper all the time, and JPEG images look much better than
GIFs on such hardware. Within a couple of years, 8-bit GIF will seem as obsolete as
black-and-white MacPaint format does today.
JPEG versus GIF
JPEG is far more useful than GIF for exchange images among people with widely
varying display hardware. Hence JPEG is considerably more appropriate than GIF for
use as a Usenet posting standard.
A lot of people are scared off by the term"lossy compression." But when it comes to
representing real-world scenes, no digital image format can retain all the information
that strikes your eyeball. By comparison with the real-world scene, JPEG loses far
less information than GIF. The technical meaning of "lossy" has nothing to do with
this. It refers to loss of information over repeated compression cycles.
JPEG is not going to displace GIF entirely. For some types of images, GIF is superior
in image quality, file size, or both. One of the first things to learn about JPEG is
which kinds of images to apply it to.
Generally speaking, JPEG is superior to GIF for storing full-color or gray-scale
images of "realistic" scenes; that means scanned photographs and similar material.
Any continuous variation in color, such as occurs in highlighted or shaded areas, will
be represented more faithfully and in less space by JPEG than GIF.
CD-ROM
History: In the past three years CD-ROM has become the dominant way to distribute
many types of computer data, from commercial software to databases and corporate
applications. So it is not surprising that nearly every computer sold today includes a
CD drive. In 1994 sales of CD drives soared to more than 17 million in the United
States. In 1995, the total sales exceeded 30 million. As fast as production is
increasing prices are falling. The current standard, the quad speed (4X) drive, costs
between $200 and $400, with 6X drives at only $100 more.
Mechanism: The mechanism determines the parameters of a drive's speed. Drives
with the same mechanism usually have very similar performance specs. However,
some vendors customize their drives. They might add a chip for bigger cache or
tinker with the drive case and bundle titles and software. Vendors may also run their
own bench mark tests and come up with different specs. All the drive mechanisms
listed here are multisession Photo CD- compatible and CD-ROM/XA-ready. There
are few CDs these drives cannot read.
Data Transfer Rate: As with computer chips, there is always a newer, faster
generation just around the corner. The first drives, dubbed single-speed, have a data
transfer rate (throughput) of 150 KB per second. Double-speed drives can deliver 300
KBps. Today's standard is the 4X, which provides 600 KBps. Faster drives, including
6X and even 10X models are emerging.
Access Time: A CD-ROM drive's throughput is standardized, so a 4X drive delivers
600 KBps, regardless of manufacturer. However, throughput is not the only
measurement of playback speed. Access time and cache size can have an even greater
impact on perceived performance.
CD-ROM drives, unlike magnetic hard drives, are constant linear velocity (CLV)
devices. This means that the disc is divided into sectors of equal data size, and that
the read head must speed up to read the outer sectors and slow down to read the inner
tracks. A magnetic hard drive is the opposite, it has a constant angular velocity
(CAV) measured in revolutions per minute. Laserdisc players can read videodiscs
written in both CLV and CAV formats.
Access time is measured by seek time and latency. Speed time measures how long a
drive takes to locate the track to be read. Latency is the amount of time before the
area to be read rotates around under the drive head. Average access time takes seek
time and average latency over all the tracks into account.
Cache Size: Cache stores information immediately after the last block of data
requested in RAM, assuming that is probably what you will want next. Read- ahead
caches are particularly useful for electronic books and database applications. A
number of CD-ROM caching utilities can add some zip to a 2X drive or speed up a
4X drive.
Interfaces: CD-ROM drives for IBM compatibles have SCSI or proprietary IDE
interfaces. SCSI-1 or SCSI-2 drives let you chain multiple devices from host bus
adapter card. All Macintosh CD-ROM drives are SCSI-compliant because SCSI is
built into all Macs, except some Performas.
Form Factor: The standard internal CD drive fits in a 5.25 inch drive bay. External
versions are of similar size. External models are portable, and some manufacturers
even offer thin, battery-powered versions for laptops. External drives may also
include standard audio CD player controls on the front panel.
CD Recording Systems (CD-R): CD-ROM recording systems have gone from a
luxury to a necessity in serious multimedia studios. Two things make CD-R systems
invaluable:
• The ability to create a prototype to see how a product runs at CD speed (no
emulator is really that good).
• The ability to create a one-off disc quickly, so copies can be sent to the
reviewers in time for their next issues. A good CD-R setup includes a hard
drive or series of drives, blank CDs, mastering software for transferring
material to the CD, and a recorder.
Formats: A user should look for CD-R software that supports all the formats needed.
Common formats include ISO 9660 (for DOS - or Windows-compatible discs), HFS
(for the Mac file structure), CD-audio (standard audio disc format), and mixed mode
(audio plus data format). To create discs for both Mac and PC users, basic hybrid
support (discs that store a separate dataset for the PC and another dataset for the Mac)
or shared hybrid support (discs that store only one dataset for the Mac and PC, and
separate native directory structures for each platform) is needed.
Other formats include CD-I; CD-ROM/XA (extended architecture, which combines
CD data with interleaved compressed audio or video; and bridge discs like Kodak
Photo CD and Video CD that can be played back on more than one type of player.
Almost all CD-R software now supports multisession writing. The user can record a
disc during multiple session before the system creates a final table of contents on the
disc.
Additional sources:
Multimedia: Models for Educators
Multimedia Glossary
Hyperstand, from the publishers of NewMedia Magazine
Multimedia File Formats on the Internet
Sources used in writing this article:
World Wide Web sites included in article
Cotton, Bob and Richard Oliver: Hypermedia from Multimedia to Virtual Reality,
1993
Heid, Jim: MACWORLD Complete Mac Handbook, 1991
Kerlow, Isaac and Judson Rosebush: Computer graphics for designers and artists,
1993
New Media: 1996 Multimedia Tool Guide, November 1995, Volume 5, Number 11,
December 1995, Volume 5, Number 12
Online Access: November 1995, Volume 10, Number 11
Technological Horizons in Education (T.H.E.) JOURNAL: Multimedia Source Guide,
1995-96