ActiveMovie was the immediate ancestor of Windows Media Player 6.x, and was a

streaming media Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content i ...

technology now known as DirectShow, developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

to replace

Video for Windows Video for Windows was a suite of video playing and editing software introduced by Microsoft in 1992. A runtime version for viewing videos only was made available as a free add-on to Windows 3.1, which then became an integral component of Windows ...

. ActiveMovie allows users to view media streams, whether distributed via the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

, an intranet or CD-ROMs. Originally announced in March 1996, the first version was released in May 1996 bundled with the beta version of Internet Explorer 3.0. When ActiveMovie was installed an option was added to the Start Menu to launch the ''ActiveMovie Control''. This allowed users to play multimedia files and thus was a rudimentary media player. In March 1997, Microsoft announced that ActiveMovie was going to become part of the DirectX set of technologies, and by July it was being referred to as DirectShow. Version 5.2 of Windows Media Player would remove the ''ActiveMovie Control'' icon from the Start Menu upon installation. Microsoft provided instructions for reinstalling the icon on its website.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Activemovie Internet Protocol based network software DirectX Internet Explorer Windows 95 Discontinued Windows components

See also

References