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Tuesday 25th April 2006

Microsoft shows off Vista's multimedia features 10:25AM, Tuesday 25th April 2006

Microsoft has been giving a sneak peek of the much trumpeted multimedia features of the new Windows Vista operating system. The company is saying that it has built the multimedia capabilities of the Vista operating system 'from the ground up'.

Many of the improvements in Windows Vista have been promised for a long time but now Microsoft is actually beginning to demonstrate some of the features.

Among the improvements to Vista's multimedia powers are what the company calls 'Glitch resilience'. According to Microsoft, Windows Vista includes the ability to give maximum priority to audio and video processes so that the streamed music or video will not be interrupted by other processes and create 'glitches' in the content.

In addition, Windows Vista will have 32-bit floating point in the core of the audio system



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which will allow for much higher-quality digital signal processing and support for up to 144 dB signal-to-noise ratio with bit-for-bit sample level accuracy. The promise is that Vista will deliver higher fidelity, even with lower-end consumer-grade audio hardware.

Microsoft is also introducing the concept of 'device roles' to the new operating system. A modern PC may have a number of different peripherals hanging off the various ports each used for a different activity such as communication, work related or home entertainment.

Windows Vista will make it easier to set up these devices by providing device roles for three categories of general, music and movies, and communication. Applications can be set to output content through specific devices. For example e-mail alerts can be sent through to headphones whilst music would be streamed through an external sound system.

Finally, unlike previous versions of Windows which have a one size fits all volume control Vista will support per-application volume control, so that users do not have to reset the volume control every time they want to play system sounds and other applications.

Steve Malone

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