Proprietary vs Standard Formats

The use of Microsoft Windows Multimedia File Formats

Martin P. Lee & Stephanie A. Robertson

Abstract

This paper begins by introducing Microsoft Windows together with some of its accessory programs. It continues with a discussion of its multimedia file formats for text, sound, graphics, animation, video, hypertext and hypermedia. The paper concludes by arguing for the adoption of the de facto multimedia file formats from the world of Microsoft Windows.

Introduction

Cartledge (1994) argues convincingly that since there are an order of magnitude more IBM compatible Personal Computers (PCs) than Apple Macintoshes and two orders of magnitude more PCs than SUN UNIX workstations, graphical user interface (GUI) based applications should be developed and deployed on PCs. He states that "the continued focus on UNIX in research is a barrier to the transfer of results into general use. PCs are cheap, effective and available from a huge range of suppliers."

Windows

Microsoft Windows is the dominant Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers (WIMP) Graphical User Interface (GUI) on PCs. One of its attractive features is its integration of multimedia (Lee 1994a). In particular it allows the production of compound documents which are a cheap and easy way into multimedia (King and Murray 1992).

Windows comes with a variety of accessory programs including a sound recorder, a media player, an object packager and a paint program.

The sound recorder can be used to play, record and edit sound files. It has the four standard video recorder style buttons of play, stop, fast forward and rewind together with a waveform display. Various special effects, such as volume, speed reverse play and echo can be manipulated.

The media player controls hardware devices, such as a videodisc player, and thus plays multimedia files such as sound or animation. The player distinguishes between simple devices such as audio compact disc (CD) players and compound devices such as Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) sequences. Like the sound recorder it has video buttons, together with track and time information.

Media player uses the media control interface (MCI) so that one application can control a variety of devices and files. Quitting the media player ends the playing of animations, MIDI sequences and waveform audio files. Audio CDs and videodiscs continue playing back after media player has been quit.

The object packager can be used to create an icon that represents an embedded or linked object which can then be inserted into a document. It can be used to wrap a variety of data types including text, graphics, sound, animations, even DOS commands into a package depicted as an icon. The icon can then be embedded into a document and then activated by clicking on it with a mouse pointer. Icons can be moved, sized and customised (King & Murray 1992).

Windows paint is a capable bitmap graphics program which can be used to produce illustrations. It has a variety of graphic tools and palettes and supports both the Windows native bitmap (.BMP) and the PC paintbrush (.PCX) file formats.

Windows introduced a powerful scalable font technology in the form of True Type font (.TTF) files. These can be scaled, displayed and printed on a wide variety of graphical output devices. In particular a sans serif font (Arial), a serif font (Times New Roman) and a monospaced font (Courier) are bundled with Windows and are accessible to all Windows programs. In addition Windows has a native font file format (.FON).

Sound

Windows recognises three types of sound: wave files (.WAV), Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) files (.MID) and audio Compact Disc (CD) files. Whereas wave files are Windows' native sound format, MIDI files are examples of metafiles consisting of musical instrument sound instructions.

Graphics

Windows automatically copes with a variety of graphical displays (e.g. CGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA and XGA) and a very wide variety of graphical output devices (i.e. printers and plotters) as part of its comprehensive device independence policy. The Windows native raster graphics format is Bit-Mapped Paint (.BMP) files with 1,2 4, 8 and 24 bit colour planes, whilst the native vector graphics format is Windows MetaFiles (.WMF). The importance of graphics in education is illustrated in Peacock et al (1986) from the programming, rather than creative, angle.

Animation

Third party public domain software products, particularly Autodesk's Animation Player for Windows (AAPlay .FLI files), can be used to create animations from sequences of graphics files, to add sound in the form of MIDI or wave files, and create scripts that control playback.

Video

Microsoft's Video for Windows Audio/Video Interleaved files (.AVI) currently have rather limited capabilities and hardware support for data compression (MPEG) is really needed.

Hypertext

The Windows Help System (WHS) is a powerful hypertext system with hot words and hot spot graphics, glossaries, navigation buttons, tables of contents, indexes, search histories, searching and back-tracking (Lee 1994b). Fortunately the Windows help compiler (HC31.EXE) is in the public domain which facilitates the production of high quality hypertext files (.HLP). Input to the compiler consists of Microsoft's Rich Text Format (.RFT) files using double underlining to indicate hot words, hidden text to represent jump targets and footnotes to indicate keywords and topics.

Since over 50 million owners of Windows have a copy of WINHELP.EXE the Windows help viewer is far and away the most common hypertext system available.

Hypermedia

The Microsoft Windows Multimedia Viewer Publishing Toolkit is a small development of the WHS to include additional multimedia objects. Using these tools, Microsoft have produced a successful series of state-of-the-art CD-ROM based hypermedia systems, for instance their Cinemania product (CINMANIA.MVB).

Conclusion

This paper has argued for the adoption of de facto multimedia file formats from the world of Microsoft Windows. These are proprietary formats and not de jure standards, but they are supported by the marketplace. There is a risk of being 'locked-in' to one supplier but that has to be traded off against the benefits of cheap and readily available file formats. The following table summarises the recommended file extensions:

		Datafile	Metafile

Text		.FON		.TTF
Sound		.WAV		.MID
Graphics	.BMP		.WMF
Hypertext	.HLP		.RTF
Hypermedia	.MVB		.RTF

References

Cartledge C 1994 "Developing graphical user interface based applications on a PC. Why.? How.?" read at JISC-RAL awareness workshop on Graphical User Interface Development Tools, Imperial College, London.

King T & Murray R 1992 "A cheap and easy way into multimedia" The CTISS File 14, 16-19.

Lee M P & Soper J B 1992 "Integrating and enhancing DOS programs using Windows 3". Collegiate Mirocomputer 10, 4, 248-254.

Lee M P 1994a "Integrating multimedia with Microsoft Windows version 3.1" accepted by the Third International Conference on Systems Integration, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Lee M P 1994b "Low cost hypertext authoring with the Microsoft Windows help compiler" submitted to the ACM European Conference on Hypermedia Technology, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Peacock D, Manning P C & Lee M P 1996 "New microcomputer graphics routines designed for undergraduate teaching" ACM SIGCSE Bulletin 18, 2, 38-50.

Graphics Multimedia Virtual Environments Visualisation Contents