Modern multimedia presentation and applications are becoming increasingly interactive.
Simple interactions that simply start movie clips, audio segments animations etc are very common. Recently complex interactions between media is available. Following hyperlinks is instinctively non-linear and the advent of digital TV has lead to the need of a wide choice and the need for interactivity.
Interatcivity now needs to be incorporated as part of the media representation/format. The MHEG format (see below) has been developed expressely for such purposes.
We have now briefly addressed the need for integrated and interactive media formats. One last topic before we discuss specific formats is the need for common interchange formats.