Provide a Rich Media Experience with Windows 8

Microsoft designed Windows 8 to enable its users to engage in a variety of rich multimedia activities. Offering Microsoft Development experts to engage with these capabilities through an extensible media platform was also one of their goals. As compared to other versions of Windows, Microsoft has remarkably improved its media experience in Windows 8. Right from the codec support to UI of the media players, they have designed this media experience to:

• Simplify Development:
A platform that could be easily extended and tailored during application development that enables developers to build innovative custom media apps on Windows.
• Maximize Performance:
Media playback is fast and responsive, enabling the full power of the hardware while maximizing battery life on each PC. This platform would then enable a wide range of multimedia apps, music, video, etc.

With Windows 8 media platform, those involved in Microsoft development can deliver a fluid and responsive media experience along with great battery life. Microsoft claims that it has engineered Windows to provide a great user experience. As media applications continue to evolve further at a rapid pace, the media platform that Windows 8 offers will enable these experiences to stand out across all Windows 8 PCs. Some of the key features of Windows 8 with regards to media application development are:

Multiple Media Scenarios Support

Features like seamless connection to external media devices, support for modern video formats and low-latency communication streams forms an integral aspect of the Windows 8 platform. Performance is important as are the features of Windows 8 that are enhanced because of the performance.

Low Latency

Windows 8 is designed to support both playback-optimized and communication-optimized scenarios. This helps drastically reduce or even avoid end-to-end delay that is caused as a result of buffering. The media infrastructure switches between a playback mode (high buffering, more tolerant of varying conditions) and a communications-optimized mode (low delay) to achieve this.

Extended Battery Life

One of the most important features that the Windows 8 platform offers is extended battery life (reduced power consumption) during audio playback. The audio playback pipeline has been drastically improved by batching up large chunks of audio data and processing that chunk at one time. This increases efficiency during steady-state playback. The CPU can stay off for over 100 times longer (over 1 second vs. 10ms), which in turn results in increased battery life during audio playback.

Seamless Playback of Premium Content

Enabling seamless playback of high definition, premium video content is another important feature that Windows 8 offers. Unlike any other video content, premium video content requires two substantial platform features in order to deliver the best experience. These include adaptive bitrate streaming and content protection. Both these aspects are offered by Windows 8.

There are a host of other important features other than the ones mentioned above that make Windows 8 the most desirable platform for Microsoft development enthusiasts. The internal software structure improvements in Windows 8 will make it simple to use and share media across devices.