Glossary
Aspect Ratio | Used to describe the distribution of pixels in a digital |
| image. Increasing the aspect ratio of an image lowers |
| the efficiency of the use of the pixels. The resulting |
| image will have less detail than an image with the |
| same amount of pixels, but with a lower aspect ratio. |
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Audio Video | Developed by Microsoft, a multimedia container format |
Interleave (AVI) | which contains both audio as well as video data allowing |
| Simultaneous playback. |
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Bandwidth | The range of signal frequencies that a piece of audio or |
| video equipment can encode or decode; the difference |
| between the limiting frequencies of a continuous |
| frequency band. Video uses higher frequency that audio, |
| thus requires a wider bandwidth |
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Composite | A picture signal combined with synchronization and |
Video | (possibly) color information. It is a composite of three |
| source signals called Y, U and V (together referred to as |
| YUV). |
MP3 | Also known as |
| audio format that was designed to reduce the amount of |
| data required to represent audio, without compromising |
| the audio quality. |
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MPEG | The Moving Picture Experts Group is a working group that |
| is responsible for the development of video and encoding |
| standards. |
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NTSC | Adopted by the National Television Systems Committee, |
| the analog television system that is currently in use in |
| Canada, Japan, South Korea, the United States and some |
| other countries, mostly in the Americas. |
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OGG Vorbis | An audio compression format that is absolutely free, open |
| and unpatented |
DivX® | Created by DivX Inc., a video codec that is able to |
| compress large video segments into smaller sizes while |
| maintaining a high visual quality. |
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dolby ® Digital | Audio compression technology developed by dolby ® |
or AC3 | laboratories. The technology contains up to 6 channels |
| of sound, five channels for normal range speakers, |
| which include Right front, Center, Left Front, Right |
| Rear and Left Rear, as well as one channel for the |
| subwoofer. Mono and Stereo usages are also supported |
| by this format. |
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Digital Rights | Technology used by publishers to control access to and |
Management | usage of hardware and digital data, such as software, |
(DRM) | music and movies. |
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Digital Theater | A |
Systems (DTS™) | used for theatrical as well as consumer grade |
| applications. |
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Downmixing | Downmixing allows playback device' to deliver a 5.1 |
| channel signal to a mono signal. This allows the |
| traditional |
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Broadcasting of television signals with a significantly | |
(HDTV) | higher resolution than traditional formats, such as PAL or |
| NTSC, would allow. |
Phase | The analog (a |
Alternation Line | currently in use in Europe and several countries in Asia. |
(PAL) |
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Progressive | A method for displaying, storing or transmitting moving |
Scan | images in which the lines of each frame are drawn in |
| sequence. It subjectively increases vertical resolution and |
| reduces flickering. |
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Separate video is an analog video signal that carries the | |
| video data as two separate signals. |
| 480i or 576i resolution. |
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A file format that contain | |
Object (VOB) | the video, audio, subtitle and the menu contents in a |
| streaming format. |
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VBR | Variable Bit Rate means that a bit stream has a |
| changing number of bits per second. Simple scenes can |
| be assigned a low bit rate, with complex scenes using a |
| higher bit rate. This enables maintaining the consistency |
| across audio and video quality with optimal file size. |
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Windows Media | A Microsoft product that is a compressed audio format |
Audio (WMA) | developed to compete with the MP3 audio format. |
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