Managing File/Data Compression In CD-Based Multimedia Application

The purpose of this thesis paper is to look at the most suitable file formats to be used in the development of a CD-ROM based multimedia application. A few problems encountered by the developers in producing a quality CD-ROM
titles especially when dealing with the sizes of the files. Files that took a lot of space in the disk, normally will take quite some time to be downloaded.
Multimedia application is an application that combines elements such as text, graphics, audio, video and animation. A few file formats have been identified for each element. In determining the types of file format to be used in the development of a CD-ROM based multimedia application, comparison was made between these types of file formats. Comparison was not only made on the sizes of the files, but also to the quality of the files to be
delivered to the users. For the graphics element, the JPEG (.jpg) file format has been identified as the most suitable format to be used in the production of a CD-ROM title. The video element should be saved into the MPEG (.mpg) file format for the ease of viewing for the users without compromising on the quality of the video. The MP3 (.mp3) file format is suitable for audio files and the HTML (.him, .html) file format is suitable for texts files. For the animation, files are saved in FLICK (.fli, .flc) file format before being converted to JPEG (.jpg) file format. It is then manipulated in the authoring software such as Macromedia Director.