Technologies are constantly changing and there are many ways to distribute your products to the market. CD, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, mobile phones and the Internet are common distribution channels. Multimedia Testing involves testing your multimedia products on these different formats and mediums.

You might think that the process of producing a CD or DVD has evolved to a point where testing is no longer required. However, this is not true. With this kind of media, you first have to produce a master or gold copy of your software from which all other copies are made. If there are any mistakes in the gold copy they will be replicated to all of the media that will be distributed to your customers. This can devastate a company’s reputation and subsequent roll-backs or fixes can greatly increase costs.

These problems are typically stem from developers using one environment for testing. The compliment of drivers, plugins, codecs, etc included on the gold disc might be sufficient to install your product on that test machine, but not others.