HighMAT

HighMAT (High Performance Media Access Technologies) is a media format jointly developed by Matsushita and Microsoft for personal CD authoring with music and photo content. Currently, 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 of data, this can mean over a hundred songs or thousands of photographs. Most stand-alone DVD players today currently support playback of MP3 and JPEG content, but the internal processing capacity of these units tends 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.

Software to author HighMAT CDs transparently in Windows XP, as well as a Windows XP player for HighMAT content, can be downloaded from the official site.

"NOTE, this format has been discontinued." There is no .hmt reader support from Microsoft or other manufacturers who originally created it. Many people seem to be stuck with photos formatted in the HighMAT format (.hmt) and there is no reader available to view them.

However, recovering HighMAT created .jpggraphic files will work with a free graphics program called Irfanview. [http://www.irfanview.com Irfanview website] It works, but be careful to not overwrite your original files. To be sure, work with copies of your graphics files and not the originals. To do this, locate the image files in the folder the HighMAT software named IMAGES. They will be named with an .hmt extension. Once you have installed Irfanview, simply drag the files to an Irfanview icon on your desktop and it will display this message: "Warning! The file ("filename".hmt) is a .jpgfile with incorrect extension ! Rename?" Select YES and it will change it to a .jpg graphics file.

Be sure you work with "copies" of your .htm files and NOT the originals, which need to be copied from your original HighMAT formatted CD.

Experiment with it a bit and you will discover what works best on your computer. No answer available to restore audio or video files formatted with HighMAT.

External links

* [http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/default.mspx Windows Media site]
* [http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/consumerelectronics/highmatdevices.aspx Microsoft HighMAT devices site]
* [http://panasonic.co.jp/pavc/global/highmat/index.html Panasonic HighMAT site]