HighMAT (High Performance Media Access Technologies) is a media format jointly developed by Panasonic Corporation (Matsushita) and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

for personal

CD authoring Optical disc authoring, including CD, DVD, and Blu-ray Disc authoring, is the process of assembling source material—video, audio or other data—into the proper logical volume format to then be recorded ("burned") onto an optical dis ...

with music and photo content.

Support

Software to author HighMAT CDs transparently in

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

, as well as a Windows XP player for HighMAT content, can be downloaded from the official site. HighMAT technology has been discontinued by Microsoft.Update for HighMAT support in the Windows XP CD Writing Wizard
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Features

Burning photos and music content onto CD generally involves organizing the photos/music into directories. Since a CD can generally hold up to some 700

megabytes The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes ...

of data, this can mean over a hundred songs or thousands of photographs. When HighMAT was introduced, most stand-alone

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

players supported playback of

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

and

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

content, but the internal processing capacity of these units tended to make browsing large content libraries directly from CD very slow and tedious. HighMAT allows these stand-alone players to read lists of images and music content from the media faster, as well as providing a more convenient navigation system.

References

Compact disc Audio storage Optical computer storage media Digital audio storage {{sound-tech-stub