Multimedia Hardware Categories of Peripheral Equipments : Platforms and Processors – aspects of personal computer that affect the development and delivery of multimedia applications. Input Devices – there are a wide variety of ways of interacting with multimedia applications. Multimedia Storage – the high storage demands of multimedia materials require careful estimation and consideration of storage media. Multimedia Connections – speed of presentation will depend on the appropriate connection between devices.
Platforms and Processors The multimedia platform – the equipment on which multimedia is developed or played – needs a very comprehensive description because it covers not only the processor and operating system but also screen resolution, bit depth and sound, amount of memory and the size of the hard disk storage. It is important to distinguished between development and delivery platforms. Although these can be the same it is quite common for the multimedia application to the developed on one platform (which may have a better performance and features to support the development) and delivered on lower specification machine at a correspondingly lower cost.
Platforms and Processors Transferring multimedia assets from one platform to another must be done with care as there can be small but significant differences between how the media elements are dealt with (e.g. slightly different sampling rates for sound).
Platforms and Processors The platform should be precisely defined in terms of the version of operating system, what multimedia facilities are supported, its interaction devices (such as mouse or touch screen) and ancillary devices such as CD - ROM. Other details include: Type and speed of processorSize of hard disk storageSpeed of CD - ROM sizeConnection to networks, both local areas as well as wide area and Internet Screen resolution Number of colors supportedSound card features (8-bit, 16-bit etc.) Video compression facilities (AVG, MPEG etc.)
