The Media OS

The BeOS is known as the MediaOS, and for a good reason. It was designed from the ground up to handle the demands of today's digital media specialist.

All sound is routed through the BeOS as a digital audio stream. Developers have written applications that dip into that stream to manipulate the audio in realtime. The BeOS also includes a basic MIDI software MIDI synthesizer so you can start experimenting with MIDI right away.

Shown above: Scoobe, an oscilloscope; BamBam, a sound editor; SoundPlay, the only sound player that can play an MP3 backwards, and the included CD Player and Simple Midi Player.

Handling video, whether from disk or from an external feed, has never been easier. Subscribing to the video stream lets you apply special effects and transitions such as slides and even fades with the touch of the button.

Of course, the BeOS doesn't stop at two dimensions. The BeOS supports 3d via the industry standard OpenGL®, which has been licensed from Silicon Graphics.

The static image above fails to capture the excitement of what actually happened. First, we launched 3dmov (located in the /demos folder). This gives us a shaded, gray, rendered 3d cube. Drop a couple of images on it. The images map and shade as the cube rotates. Then drop a live video feed on another face, and launch a few movies from the hard drive to fill up the other faces. Now, the movies, live feed and images render and shade according to their position on the cube. Then use your mouse to rotate the cube any way you like. Then launch an mpeg file to provide background music for the cube. Then, fire up your favorite game and play while the movies play on.

That's what the power of symmetric multiprocessing and pervasive multithreading and preemptive multitasking bring to you.

Well, I'm a bit tired after all of that excitement, so let's kick back and surf the net.