Multimedia

The latest in multimedia and graphics improvements in Windows 2000 Professional include the following:

Accelerated Graphics Port    An Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) is a new type of expansion slot solely for video cards. Designed by Intel and supported by Windows 2000, AGP is a dedicated bus that provides fast, high-quality video and graphics performance.

Digital Video Disc    Digital Video Discs (DVDs) provide digital, optical disc storage for audio, video, and data. A single DVD can store more than two hours of high-quality audio and video, or up to 4.7 gigabytes (GB) of data. Windows 2000 supports the DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, and DVD-RAM formats for reading and writing to DVD (writing requires third-party software). Windows 2000 supports Universal Disk Format (UDF) version 1.5.

DirectX 7.0    Windows 2000 supports Microsoft DirectX version 7.0, which delivers improved multimedia performance, enhanced graphics and sound, and greater ease of use over previous releases. DirectX 7.0 also offers language support for the Microsoft Visual Basic development system.

Human Interface Devices    Windows 2000 supports the Human Interface Device (HID) firmware specification, a new standard for input and output devices such as drawing tablets, keyboards, universal serial bus (USB) speakers, and other devices designed to improve accessibility.

IEEE 1394    The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has developed a standard for ports that lets you connect high-speed digital devices, such as digital video cameras. An IEEE 1394 port, often referred to as a FireWire, provides transmission speeds of approximately 98 megabits per second (Mbps) - 393 Mbps, whereas USB provides transmission speeds of approximately 1.5 Mbps - 12 Mbps.

Multiple Monitors    Windows 2000 lets you connect up to 10 monitors to a single computer to create an extended desktop. You can display a single document or application across multiple monitors, or use each monitor to display a different document or application. For example, you can edit an HTML page on one monitor while viewing the rendered Web page on another, or stretch a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet across several monitors to view all of the columns or rows without scrolling.

OpenGL 1.2    Windows 2000 supports the latest version of Open Graphics Library (OpenGL), providing improved performance, higher visual 3-D quality, and improved capabilities for graphics applications and development.

Universal Serial Bus    Windows 2000 supports the universal serial bus (USB) to connect to a variety of auxiliary input devices, such as drawing tablets, pointing devices, speakers, and digital video cameras.

Windows Media Player    Microsoft Windows Media Player plays both stored and streaming multimedia content from a variety of formats, including Advanced Streaming Format (ASF), Windows Media Audio, MP3, and audio-video interleaved (.avi) and waveform-audio (.wav) files.