Okay, most of you seem not to like Microsoft, and sometimes their marketing methods are a little unkind to others, to say it nicely, but they did bring us some technologies we use everyday.
One of their latest developements is Corona, their next generation Windows Media which should bring Microsoft on top of the video and audio market. Read this quote of an article on Eweek.com. It sounds promising:
Demonstrations showed Microsoft has almost mastered the audio portions'”even in alpha code, Corona streamed Dolby 5.1 stereo that's virtually indistinguishable from normally encoded CDs. Corona's compression algorithm is far more advanced than MP3 technology now and may produce sound that's equivalent to the little-used HDCD audio format. |
Corona features a technology that Microsoft calls "stuffing the buffer." This allows the streaming part of an encoded audio to be blasted down to the player at a faster rate (if available) than the bit rate in which the file is encoded. Stuffing allows users to switch among "channels" quickly without the lag time associated with buffering the streams.
I guess Microsoft is going to takeover another market, but if it's with this superiority, I don't know if it's that bad for consumers, unfortunately this technology also incorporates digital rights technology.
Source: Eweek.com
