Digital media

Digital media are any media that are encoded in a machine-readable format. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified and preserved on computers. Computer programs and software; digital imagery, digital video; video games; web pages and websites, including social media; data and databases; digital audio, such as mp3s; and e-books are examples of digital media. Digital media are frequently contrasted with print media, such as printed books, newspapers and magazines, and other traditional or analog media, such as pictures, film or audio tape.

Combined with the Internet and personal computing, digital media has caused disruption in publishing, journalism, entertainment, education, commerce and politics. Digital media has also posed new challenges to copyright and intellectual property laws, fostering an open content movement in which content creators voluntarily give up some or all of their legal rights to their work. The ubiquity of digital media and its effects on society suggest that we are at the start of a new era in industrial history, called the Information Age, perhaps leading to a paperless society in which all media are produced and consumed on computers. However, challenges to a digital transition remain, including outdated copyright laws, censorship, the digital divide, and the specter of a digital dark age, in which older media becomes inaccessible to new or upgraded information systems. Digital media has a significant, wide-ranging and complex impact on society and culture.

Media center

Media center or media centre may refer to:

Audio-visual software and devices

Journalism

Librarianship

JRiver Media Center

JRiver Media Center is a multimedia application that allows the user to play and organize various types of media on a computer running Windows or Mac OS X.

JRiver Media Center is a "jukebox"-style media player, like iTunes, which usually uses most of the screen to display a potentially very large library of files.

Regular (usually daily beta) builds are posted on the Media Center Interact forum implementing requested features and fixing reported bugs. The forum has an active user community, with more than 25,000 users as of 2011.

Also available for JRiver Media Center are an Audioscrobbler plugin, and G-Force, a popular visualisation.

It can also rip and burn CDs. MediaCenter also supports static and dynamic playlists.

Library system

JRiver Media Center organizes files using Media Libraries, these are effective databases. Media Center can support multiple libraries.

Information relating to media is imported into the library including meta data for media files and the path to the media files. The media files themselves are not contained in the database, but cataloged within the libraries.