What is Multimedia Data

There are number of data types that can be characterized as multimedia data types. These are typically the elements for the building blocks of ore generalized multimedia environments, platforms, or integrating tools. The basic types can be described as follows :

• Text : The form in which the text can be stored can vary greatly. In addition to ASCII based files, text is typically stored in processor files, spreadsheets, databases and annotations on more general multimedia objects. With availability and proliferation of GUIs, text fonts the job of storing text is becoming complex allowing special effects(color, shades..).
• Images : There is great variance in the quality and size of storage for still images. Digitalized images are sequence of pixels that represents a region in the user's graphical display. The space overhead for still images varies on the basis of resolution, size, complexity, and compression scheme used to store image. The popular image formats are jpg, png, bmp, tiff.
• Audio : An increasingly popular datatype being integrated in most of applications is Audio. Its quite space intensive. One minute of sound can take up to 2-3 Mbs of space. Several techniques are used to compress it in suitable format.
• Video : One on the most space consuming multimedia data type is digitalized video. The digitalized videos are stored as sequence of frames. Depending upon its resolution and size a single frame can consume upto 1 MB. Also to have realistic video playback, the transmission, compression, and decompression of digitalized require continuous transfer rate.
• Graphic Objects: These consists of special data structures used to define 2D and 3D shapes through which we can define multimedia objects. These includes various formats used by image, video editing applications. Examples are CAD / CAM objects.