Managing Interactive Media Glossary: M

Glossary: M (43 entries found)

machine code: Zeros and ones in a program that a computer can execute directly.
magneto-optical disc: A type of disc used for data storage for which both a laser and a magnetic field are required to write data.
mainframe: A very large computer: in capability if not in size. Probably run by a dedicated team of people and able to handle many tasks simultaneously.
mark-up language: A system of marking text so that it can be understood or displayed correctly using a computer. See also HTML.
market research: Information about the changing behaviour of people and their habits, gathered by a variety of methods and organized into statistical or analytical representations.
master tape: The definitive and original recording of something.
matte: A technique, used particularly in movies and television, to enable two or more images to be combined into a single scene. Traditionally the matte is a masking inage that defines which portions of another image are foreground (and should be shown) and background (and should be replaced by another image). Sometimes the matte consists of a false section of background, painted onto glass, so that when the scene is shot though the matte the false and real backgrounds are seamlessly combined. Such mattes are, of course, static but a matte can move, inwhich case (in movies) it is known as a travelling matte. Sometimes the matte is automatically generated from portions of the scene that are a particular colour, when the technique is also known as colour-separation overlay, chromakey and green- or blue-screen. In modern use the foreground, and the matte that blends it into the scene, are often computer generated.
mechanical right: The right to record a piece of music.
megabyte: 1 048 576 bytes of data: 1024 kilobytes.
memory leak: A bug in a computer program which causes it to gradually fill up its available memory and finally crash.
menu: A set of options listed or otherwise available on screen for the user to select. A main decision point in an application might be called a menu screen even if it does not contain a conventional menu list.
merchant services: Service to facilitate trading, primarily used to mean accepting payment using credit cards. The merchant service is usually provided by a bank and ultimately has to link to a bank. May include online validation of the credit card transaction so that the merchant (i.e the online shop) can safely dispatch the goods.
metadata: Data about data: would include information on things like the format of the data. Examples include library catalogues. e-learning also has metadata standards for defining the learning elements in its content.
metatag: A tag which is placed in the header of a web page to pass control or similar information to the web browser or indexing program that reads the page.
MHEG: Multimedia and Hypermedia Experts Group, ISO standard to facilitate use and interchange of objects in interactive systems.
micon: An icon that has moving images. Few make the distinction between icon and micon and generally icon is used to cover all selection images. See also icon and picon.
middleware: Software that manages interaction between different programs, especially in a network. It might link a web server and a database.
MIDI: Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a standardized way of describing music and how it is played so that a MIDI-compatible instrument can then provide the sound.
milestone: Defined key points of the project's development. Milestones are often linked to the end of a phase of development, and can be linked to phased payment stages of the project as well.
MIME: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension, a standard way of identifying what a file is so that it is handled correctly by web servers and other computers.
mirror site: A website that contains the same content as another website. This is usually done so that access speeds can be optimized depending on where in the world the user is. Mirroring a website requires permission, otherwise it is infringement of copyright.
mobile: Pertaining to a small and transportable device, such as a hand-held computer or telephone.
mobile agent: See agent.
modelling: In 3-D graphics, building a scene by defining objects in the scene and arranging them and their environment.
modem: Stands for modulate-demodulate and usually refers to a device that takes digital data and converts it into an analogue audio signal so it can pass through the telephone system. The signal is converted back using another modem at the other end. The term is also used for any similar translation and so an ADSL system would include ADSL modems.
montage: A single graphic made from several sources.
moral rights: Rights, related to copyright, which protect a work from unauthorized changes or misattribution. This is currently a mainly European concept but is applied to works of art in US law.
morph: To change one shape into another in a smooth transitional movement.
MoSCoW: This is an example of an approach to eliciting client needs in a project where you define the items the client Must have, Should have, Could have and Would like to have. This approach derives from RAD programming techniques.
MP3: MPEG Audio Layer 3, one of the ways of compressing audio in the MPEG family of standards, widely used on the Internet. A limitation of MP3 is that it does not contain any form of rights management to control copying and so has been seen by some rights owners as a vehicle for piracy.
MPEG: Motion Picture Experts Group, a group of ISO standards for compression of video and definitions of multimedia objects.
MPEG audio: The MPEG standard includes three levels of audio. Level 1 is used for DCC (digital compact cassette), Level 2 is used in DVD and digital broadcasting and Level 3 (better known as MP3) gives the best compression and is widely used to compress audio on the Internet.
MPEG-1: The version of MPEG that compresses video to a data rate of around one megabit per second. The quality is similar to that of S-VHS.
MPEG-2: The version of MPEG for broadcast quality video at bit rates of the order of 8 megabits per second. Digital television, DVD and Sony's Betacam-SX use MPEG-2. (MPEG-3 was to have dealt with high definition but it was eventually included in MPEG-2.)
MPEG-4: An extension to MPEG introducing object-oriented structures to audio and video and compression for low bit rates or higher quality at moderate bit rates. Increasingly used as compression for high-definition TV.
MPEG-7: An extension to MPEG to provide a standard framework for indexing audio-visual material. (There is no MPEG-5 or 6 and the number 7 is the sum of 1, 2 and 4. The next MPEG is MPEG-21 which is a multimedia framework allowing an overview of all aspects of content delivery covered by the other MPEGs.)
MPU: Message Plus Unit, a large advertisement placed within the body of a web page.
multi-session disc: A CD-ROM that can be/is written to more than once with each new set of data being added onto the end of the rest until the disc is full.
multicultural: Communication that needs to be produced specifically for different languages and cultures.
multimedia narrative: The structure underpinning forms of interactive communication. Interactive narrative allows the user to take control of the sequencing of information, and this is what differentiates multimedia narrative from more traditional forms of narrative.
multiscan: Referring to a computer monitor that can work with a range of display resolutions and scan rates. Most computer monitors are now multiscan to some extent, although with a flat-screen monitor only one resolution will be the native resolution and so give the best results.
multitasking: Able to do more than one task at once.
MySQL: An open source relational database management system widely used on the Internet. Often used on websites in conjunction with PHP.