Microsoft has made public a whole list of new media streaming features which it will include in its soon-to-be-launched operating system, the Windows 8.
The software giant said that that the Windows 8 Media Platform will offer optimum performance and fast and responsive media playback by utilizing the hardware’s true power.
Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s president of Windows, said that video decoding for all common media formats will now be handled by a dedicated hardware subsystem for media, allowing CPU usage to be substantially lowered- giving smooth video playback and better battery life. This is because the dedicated media hardware is more efficient at media decoding, compared to the CPU. Thus, all tasks requiring video decoding, like playback, encoding, transcoding and capture will be improved.
Sinofsky also explained how the Windows 8 media platform will confront the latency issue, in which end-to-end delay in communications will be reduced for the “near-instant” responses.
The new platform will also include support for HD cameras, in order to provide a better video call experience. The new drivers will work transparently with the applications so as to support HD video features. Microsoft has improved the pipeline latency, and has even added support for H.264 cameras, allowing users to communicate with their loved ones in high-fidelity HD video.
The software giant added that it has also improved adaptive bitrate streaming functions, for example, for the YouTube movies, by displaying the initial frames of the video at a lower bitrate so as to decrease start-up and seek times, bringing down the buffering time and enhancing responsiveness.
