DCI is a standard created by Microsoft to display the drivers technology. It was introduced in 1994 and allows Windows to take advantage of a number of advanced features. These features include the double buffering, which blocks the data transfer speeds, the colors conversion, which is useful when playing compressed digital videos; the overlay, which is the partial coverage of the objects, in order to be displayed faster and the stretching, which makes the images to be distorted or extended in order to play faster. These features can be useful for different applications which are graphics-intensive, such as computer aided design, preparation of presentations and the publishing of professional papers.
MIDI, on the other hand, is a protocol, which allows the transfer of music-related digital data between electronic devices, either keyboard or PC. No hardware is required, because the PC board has the possibility of playing MIDI files. So MIDI data contain only instructions that allow the desired musical sound to be reproduced.
For this reproduction actually to take place, the device that originally created the sound instruction, and the device, which aims to reproduce the sound, need to communicate with each other using the same rules or language, and this is where MIDI starts working.
One of the advantages that MIDI has, is the file size. MIDI files contain instructions for reproducing sounds only, and therefore they are much smaller than the Wave files. As the number of games and multimedia products, including MIDI, grows, so does the number of sound cards that are sold with these possibilities, such as standard MIDI port for connecting to a MIDI instrument. In addition, you can use MIDI, for example, to show multimedia presentations, which may sound unrealistic to highlight the visual presentation, which appears on the screen.
The new technology incorporated in Windows systems, which is referring to MultiMessaging allows more instructions for transferring MIDI files using a single interruption. The sound card can send and receive groups of multiple MIDI messages. For this is required less computing power, which leaves the CPU to have more free space for other applications and for processing. The processor does not have to deal with each MIDI instruction separately.
Playing videos using the Windows Media Player is a thrill even today, when there are a lot of free players out there. This feature allows the playback of videos with high efficiency. Any help came from the computer’s operating system is beneficial, because it is well known that the CPU is stressed more than usual when playing intensive videos.11
