Microsoft’s Windows Media 9 platform is going from strength to strength – it’s being adopted by more broadcasters, it’s being incorporated in more players and MS are making more refinements to the platform codecs for High Definition media.
Microsoft are watching the platform’s popularity in the film and television world and are building on this by partnering with media companies to develop its range of functions. Work with Adobe, CineForm and BOXX Technologies has demonstrated WM9’s multi-stream High Definition capabilities, and companies like USDTV have adopted 9 as their broadcast format.
It’s not just all broadcast work either — Sonic solutions are introducing DVD Producer WMV HD Edition for producing High Definition DVDs later this year.
Microsoft is also submitting an update to its WM9 compression codec to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers
Tandberg Television are currently demonstrating their EN5920 encoding platform – the only hardware encoding solution for WM9 available. Companies like NTL Broadcast and Swisscom’s Bluewin are trialling the EN5920 to provide real-time encoding and decoding of WM9 streams to domestic digital TV customers.
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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