Navigating the Media Maze

Abstract

Media experiences have long been a weakness in Microsoft platforms, but not because those features aren’t inherently available in the system. Windows provides a wide spectrum of built-in playback and management features. The area in which the platform has fallen short is in the exposing of media content-creation and -management facilities to the end user. If you know DirectX or any of the low-level APIs, then you’re good to go as far as this. But the reach of such technologies has traditionally not fallen far from organizations with the funding to hire resources with that knowledge.