In the last few years, we have seen a major evolution in the computer industry: the release of the multimedia technology. Multimedia and the movement towards online services and Internet are the two dominant trends in the field of high technology equipment, software and telecommunications. Both issues are widely represented in Microsoft Windows systems, which include many popular multimedia and network facilities.
Another major trend is the explosion of PC home computers. The existence of multiple computers in a single house has led to an increased demand for innovative applications, “non-business”, such as the creation of media CDs and interactive games for educational, entertaining purposes that include sounds and videos.
As a result most computers that are sold now have a CD-ROM and a DVD-ROM included, in addition to the sound cards that support advanced audio performance, such as MIDI, which has seen a spectacular increase. With this evolution of technology, is not surprising that Windows includes extensive multimedia features. This is a good thing for the user, it allows him to add multimedia capabilities to take advantage of the multimedia features with a small effort.
The only thing you need to take care is to buy a PC with multimedia hardware components, such as a sound card and a CD-ROM included. Windows contains many multimedia enhancements, including Video for Windows (previously sold as separate product). It accepted the standards for large-screen video images, an important feature if you intend to watch more videos on the PC.
There also deserves to be mentioned the increased ease with which you can add multimedia hardware components, such as a sound card or CD-ROM. The Plug and Play standard of Windows 95/98 allows you to add components that adhere to the standard with minimum problems. And the Windows Device Manager will enable to minimize these conflicts. Windows 95 also included, at that time, an improved graphics support for games using the Wing, an interface for applications, which enables Bitmap graphics (bmp) stored in the memory, to appear on the screen faster.
Multimedia is at the point where it awaits various types of media. In the past, the manufacturers tended to provide computer users a large range of media opportunities: in general, of poor quality text and graphics. But the improved performance of hardware components in the industry today have resulted in a wider range of products that intensively use the processor, having graphics functions that lead to full-motion videos and sounds.
With the ability to choose between these environments, and to increase your opportunity to interact with the program you use, now you have more possibilites to stay connected to your computer than in the past. Now many games on CDs and advanced products will allow you to choose which path to follow when you enter the program.
Every time you use the multimedia products, you can choose different routes: perhaps you want to watch a fragment of a film, instead of seeing the entire movie. To take advantage of multimedia hard components, you need additional RAM and probably a bigger hard drive that will store huge video and sound files.
In 1992, when Microsoft introduced the Video for Windows standard, the video display was totally inadequate. Viewing was done on 1 / 16 of a VGA screen size having 160 pixels by 120 pixels. After the inclusion in the updated versions of Windows 95, of the program called Video for Windows, although at a relatively low performance, the video can appear on the entire screen (full screen), having a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels.11