Category Archives: 3. Multimedia

3. Multimedia, Computing Higher

Happy Birthday MIDI

Hello class of the future, I am writing this in November. I have had a guess at when we will get to MIDI.

MIDI is 30 years old! That’s odd, because when you here me talk about it in class most of you will think it’s a modern standard.

There are lots of website that have MIDI music and the quality of the playback depends on the sound fonts or instruments you have installed on your sound card.

Feel free to try making your own MIDI music, if you don’t have a MIDI keyboard, you can always download one.

3. Multimedia, Computing Higher

Multimedia Display Technologies

For these I think I will just let the videos do the talking

3. Multimedia, Computing Higher

Contemporary communications

  • buses
  • wireless standards
    • Bluetooth and WiFi have came a long way since they were introduced and are much available than they were only a few years ago. The adoption of these standards has allowed a new range of connected devices and these have increased the uptake of multimedia.
  • increasing bandwidth
  • USB
    • USB has went from 1.5Mbps to 5Gbps in 12 years. This standard interface is by far the most popular wired connection type on computers. It allows the computer to be attached to large range of peripherals, some useful and some not so much.
  • Firewire
    • or ieee 1394 as it is known on non Apple devices, supports speeds up to 3.2Gbps and is mostly used to connect storage devices. Apple is phasing this out favour of Intel’s new thunderbolt standard.
3. Multimedia

Storage technologies

  • decreasing size and price
    • Processors continue to decrease in price.  We are starting to see an increase in convergence of technologies. Take my first “Smart phone” it is a poor cousin to my current phone. My new phone does everything I can think of it but in 5 years time, I will look back and wonder how I ever did without……?
  • increasing capacity
    • Capacity doubles every 18 months following Moore’s Law. This means that we have seen a dramatic increase in available storage capacity. What will you fill your first Petabyte drive with ?
  • Optical storage
    • CD, DVD & BluRay we are used to these sharing the same physical size but the capacity of each radically different. They accomplish this by using lasers with a much smaller wavelength and more advanced electronics. There is discussion that Bluray will be the last optical storage medium, however, there may be a 6TB successor.
  • Magnetic storage
  • Holographic storage
    • The concept of Holographic storage has been around for quite a while (1960s), we are only now starting to make progress.
    • Holographic storage has a high capacity, fast access times.
    • Stores data in a number of 3D images
    • Hundreds of images may be saved in different layers/full depth of medium
    • Information can be stored in layers (throughout the full depth of the medium)
    • Information can be read a layer at a time (in Parallel) rather than as a sequence of bits
3. Multimedia

SVG Tutorial

Object oriented graphics (Vector Graphics) are scalable but often need specialised viewers

SVG Short for Scalable Vector Graphics, a vector graphics file format that enables two-dimensional images to be displayed in XML pages on the Web. Vector images are created through text-based commands formatted to comply with XML specifications. In contrast to JPEG and GIF images on the Web, which are bitmapped and always remain a specified size, SVG images are scalable to the size of the viewing window and will adjust in size and resolution according to the window in which it is displayed.

Please turn to page 90 of your scholar notes and follow the tutorial to create the images shown there. If you want to learn more then try these tutorials.

You can view the saved SVG files with irfanview.

3. Multimedia, Computing Higher

Colour Look-Up Table (CLUT)

From Dictionary.com

A device which converts the logical colour numbers stored in each pixel of video memory into physical colours, normally represented as RGB triplets, that can be displayed on the monitor. The palette is simply a block of fast RAM which is addressed by the logical colour and whose output is split into the red, green and blue levels which drive the actual display (e.g. CRT).
The number of entries (logical colours) in the palette is the total number of colours which can appear on screen simultaneously. The width of each entry determines the number of colours which the palette can be set to produce.
A common example would be a palette of 256 colours (i.e. addressed by eight-bit pixel values) where each colour can be chosen from a total of 16.7 million colours (i.e. eight bits output for each of red, green and blue).
Changes to the palette affect the whole screen at once and can be used to produce special effects which would be much slower to produce by updating pixels.