Microsoft Multimedia Viewer

~ the eulogy ~

by the time i could have looked at multimedia viewer as a piece of software, it was already gone. i opened a windows machine for the first time at an internet cafe in 2002 on a windows 98 second edition install. by then multimedia viewer had already been absorbed into other engines and the disc-based help system was the last place it surfaced in the wild. the consumer apps that ran on it were the visible ones with encarta at the front, the viewer itself was the library underneath that you only noticed if you opened the help-file format with a hex editor.

what it was, in the layer the developer cared about. a microsoft-built authoring tool for windows cd-rom titles released in september 1991. it sat on top of winhelp, the same help-file engine windows 3.1 used for application help. you wrote your content in rich text format with a special markup style. you compiled it to an.mvb file. the viewer played the file back with images and short audio and inline video clips. version 2 came out in 1993 with a stronger search index. that was the last version microsoft sold as a standalone product.

the first edition of encarta in 1993 shipped on multimedia viewer. bookshelf had been using a similar engine since 1987, and the 1991 cd-rom editions moved over. cinemania shipped on it. the merck manual cd-rom from third-party publishers shipped on it. by 1996 microsoft was rewriting the underlying runtime inside encarta into a custom multimedia engine. the standalone multimedia viewer sdk stopped getting updates. the.mvb file format kept playing in winhelp on later windows versions for as long as winhelp itself was supported, which carried it as a zombie format into windows xp.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it powered ~

the list of titles multimedia viewer powered is most of the first microsoft home wave. encarta on the first three editions. bookshelf on every annual edition from 1991 through about 1995. cinemania on the early ones. third-party publishers used the sdk too, with the cd-rom edition of the merck manual being a high-profile case. the engine handled the heavy lifting that made a 1992 cd-rom feel multimedia at all. hotspot maps over images. embedded sound on click. a gridded image browser. a search box that worked against the compiled index.

in fairness, viewer was not the first such engine. apple had hypercard from 1987. the toolbook system from asymetrix predated viewer by a year and was actually more flexible at the scripting layer. viewer's edge was that it was built into the same family of formats as winhelp. any developer who already knew the winhelp pipeline could pivot to a cd-rom title without learning a new authoring system. that was the wedge microsoft pushed at the third-party reference-disc market.

~ what it became ~

multimedia viewer aged the way infrastructure ages. once the consumer apps that used it were rewritten to use their own engines, the standalone sdk had no audience left. the winhelp side carried the technical core forward as part of windows itself. microsoft retired winhelp from later windows by yanking the renderer out of vista in 2007 and turning it into a separate download. the.mvb files that any title developer had shipped between 1991 and 1996 became unreadable on a default windows install by the end of the decade.

as an engineering object the lesson is the one every shared format learns. an engine survives only as long as the products on top of it keep depending on it. the moment encarta rewrote its runtime, viewer was a backwater. the moment winhelp lost first-class support, the format became a thing you needed a separate installer for. nobody outside the people who wrote encarta-class titles in the early nineties remembers that this layer existed.

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