Drupal core has two key features that assist with the integration of rich media, the Upload module and embedding. The Upload module allows users to attach different types of files to node types of your choosing. This feature allows for very basic integration with media files. There are two limitations that you will deal with when using the upload module. The size of file uploads may be limited by your web host which could limit what types of media you can upload to the site. If you are able to upload the file you want the upload function does not provide any post upload processing or embed the media within your posts.
Drupal core also allows you to embed media within nodes that is hosted on other websites. So if you have photos hosted on Flickr or videos hosted on YouTube you can paste the provided embed code into your posts. And you are also free to create a link to the original location of the media in your post. It is important to note that if you wish to embed media from other sites you must have the "Full HTML" input format selected. The standard "Filtered HTML" input format strips out the embed tags for security reasons.