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Catch up with media audio Audio and video formats may sound like an obscure byway of the computing technology landscape. But they are the centre of an interconnected web of technologies that span all corners of the computing industry today. This has been further highlighted by emerging technologies such as internet TV, where faster and more efficient video streaming technologies are high in demand, and high performance media formats such as WMV have helped Microsoft extend its dominance in the PC market to other areas, an issue that was even at the centre of its antitrust trials.
Microsoft, in their effort to become a strategic centre in the emerging world of digital media, has embarked on developing a host of software products intended to establish and consolidate its influence in the fields of digital music and video. Digital media such as MP3 music files or streams of video sent over the internet must inevitably be created, edited, encrypted, encoded, indexed and distributed, and Microsoft has developed software that perform all these tasks where the Windows Media Codec series and the latest beta release of Windows Media Player 11 form the cutting edge of this strategy. One key part of Microsoft’s strategic plan to establish itself as a key player in the multimedia arena has been the Windows Media Video (WMV) format. It heralded a new way to encode video for streaming over the internet, and easy and economical distribution. The WMV codec series has been under development for years, and it reached a key milestone with the release of WMV9 as an open standard, which was accepted by SMPTE as VC-1. Microsoft realised that freezing the format will make it possible to encode and decode files without having to worry about whether the file will be out of date in a few months. That could reduce the reluctance of business partners to target their products to the WMV format. Video information currently is encoded with several formats: MPEG-2 (used on digital cable TV set-top boxes), MPEG-4, Apple Computer’s QuickTime format and other methods. The .3gp format is also in the fore, revolutionising video captured by devices such as mobile phones. But Microsoft, through the potent distribution channel that is Windows, has an immediate advantage over many competitors in finding a way to propagate its own formats. More than 90 percent of the world’s PCs run the Windows operating system. It’s a tactic familiar to Microsoft with its Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, whose particulars the company locked down three years ago. Where the competing MP3 audio format once was dominant, Microsoft has made major inroads with WMA, including support for the format in devices such as car stereos. Microsoft is also advocating the use of its Windows Media Container file format, which has the .asf file extension. It can contain audio and video information, as well as pictures such as album art, text such as play lists, and small programs called scripts. Microsoft also plans to reiterate an argument it made in the struggle to get WMA to catch on: Economics. WMV is more efficient than MPEG-4 in encoding video, letting three movies fit on a single DVD. WMV stands strong in its bid to be a dominating force in the world of multimedia and now with its standardisation, it is open for faster developments and improvements and with the role of Microsoft out of its epicentre, WMV9 stands to gain more popularity and acceptance across the world of multimedia and entertainment.
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