RSSHighMAT Spec Extended to DVDs
By Nate Mook | Published May 7, 2003, 9:24 PM
Panasonic and Microsoft announced plans to expand the HighMAT specifications to support writable DVD formats and ship the technology in their respective lines of hardware and software.
HighMAT, or High-performance Media Access Technology, defines a standard method for organizing photos, videos and music, in order to allow consumers to better access digital media when away from the PC. Currently, devices such as car stereos and DVD players must search an entire disc to find digital media, causing significant delays.
With additional backing from Fujifilm, HighMAT was initially announced last October, but supported only writable CDs at the time.
"DVDs are the storage media of the future, and as usage grows, adding HighMAT support will offer consumers better, more predictable navigation and performance on consumer electronic devices," said Amir Majidimehr, general manager of Microsoft's Windows Digital Media Division.
Roxio, maker of the popular Easy CD & DVD Creator suite, announced intentions to support HighMAT in future software revisions. Windows Media Player 9 and Movie Maker 2 already support the standard, and Microsoft has released an update for Windows XP that enables drag-and-drop burning of HighMAT CDs.
The first consumer electronics devices to support HighMAT 1.0 will debut this month from Panasonic. Newer models will support HighMAT on DVD once the specification is completed later this year.
I was very excited to try out the HighMAT format because I had been buliding web pages just so I could have and easy way to look at my pictures, but HighMAT has a 999 file limit. I guess that's fine if you want to burn a single disc per photo occasion like "2001 Vacation" and give it to some family and friends, but it isn't all that great for archiving all your photos onto an single accessible disc. So really, this format is suited towards distribution and playback, not archiving.
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|interesting, HighMAT sounds very handy. I wonder what any downsides to it are.
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|Considering it's primarily for organization and doesn't touch your data, the only downside is needing hardware that supports it. I think it's a very good move that will benefit everyone. Although you have to wonder why nobody else before Microsoft and Panasonic came up with it. But I guess they will at least use their market power to get it into devices.
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|yeah. but i mean, almost everything has a downside to it, problem with it, or something about it that could be better. i'm just wondering what it will turn out to be. :)
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|from www.highmat.com:
HighMAT provides a powerful, reliable and active standard for storing, managing and accessing digital audio, video and photo collections.
accessing could also be something with DRM.
one of the downsides is that hardware must support it. so you'd have to buy a new car audio, dvd player (de facto all non PC components) to take advantage of the new functionallity.
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|Well that's expected. You can't blame them for that. But like I said, there is always something wrong or something that could be better, and I was just waiting for it to come out into the open. And there is the first one, in the above post, there is a 999 filesize limit. So archiving is out of the question. But maybe that number will increase when they release support for DVD writable formats (since they have more space available)
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