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From VCDs to DVDs, digital medium is dominating the landscape.
Even television broadcasts are becoming digital, offering excellent quality in pictures and sounds.
Digital video has been recognized as a medium in multimedia technology - along with texts, audio and animations.
There are many challenges in running video movies within multimedia applications. This chapter and few others that follow will expound this topic at reasonable depths.
It is interesting to think about situations in a multimedia project that demand digital videos.
For example, let us consider “Tourist In India - Interactive Multimedia Guide” CD-ROM. The product features important tourist places all across the country. It will be nice, if we could show some video clippings filmed on specific locations - while talking about that particular tourist destination. This will help the user to visualise things and imagine the look and feel of that particular location.
As a second example, let us look at Microsoft Oceans CD-ROM. It will certainly be a value addition, if we could add a few video cllippings filmed underwater - right inside the oceans. It will nicely supplement the facts and figures we are presenting about oceans.
Now, let us consider a third example - where digital videos are unnecessary.
Tales from Indian Mythology CD-ROM features animated tales for children. The whole CD-ROM, from end to end, is full of digital animations. If we were to feature digital videos in between, it will most certainly interfere with the aura created by fantasy worlds created with the help of 3D and 2D animations. Hence it should be avoided.