MULTIMEDIA INFORMATION SYSTEM
The word multimedia is made up of the two Latin words "multi" which means many and "media" which is the substance through which something is transmitted. In this case multi is the multiple data types such as voice, video, image, animation, text etc. and media is the computer environment used to transmit the information made up of this multiple data types. Multimedia data imposes new requirements to the computer networks due to the large volumes involved. In addition to huge volumes the way we look at multimedia information is also different.
Multimedia Information System (MIS) is then one which allows end-users to share, communicate and process a variety of forms of information in an integrated manner
MIS is attempting to solve the problems of information management by integrating the various forms of media into the computer/communications infrastructure
Benefits of achieving this level of integration:
– The computer can help in the task of managing and processing the information;
– Information users only have to deal with one integrated environment rather than a number of separate information systems.
multimedia applications and systems are getting more and more involved in our everyday lives. their main purpose is to deal with various media types like pictures, video data, audio data, and text. video and audio belong to continuous media data. pictures and text belong to discrete media data.
when most people refer to multimedia, they generally mean the combination of two or more continuous media. in practice, the two media are normally audio and video that is, sound plus moving pictures.
Why do we need multimedia file systems?
The challenge on multimedia systems is media types that need to be played continuously. That means that the data that should be played has to arrive in real time (or at least until a certain strict deadline). Continuous media data differs from discrete data but not only in its real-time characteristics. A challenge for these systems is also the synchronization of pictures and the according to sound. Hence these can be two different data streams, it is important to synchronize these before showing them on the monitor. Another difference to discrete data is the file size. Video and audio need much more storage space than text data and the multimedia file system has to organize this data on disk in a way that efficiently uses the limited storage.
