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| Glossary |
VCD
It is an abbr. for "Video Compact Disc" and basically it is a CD that contains moving pictures and sound. VCD uses a compression standard called MPEG-1 to store the video and audio and has a capacity to hold up to 74 / 80 minutes on 650MB / 700MB CDs respectively of full-motion video along with quality stereo sound. It can be played on almost all standalone DVD Players and of course on all computers with a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drive with the help of software based decoder / player.
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DVD
It is an abbr. for "Digital Versatile Disk". DVD has the same size as a CD but stores seven times CD Capacity on a single side. It is the next generation of optical disc storage technology. DVD can be double sided or dual layer. DVD use a 5 inch disc with anywhere from 4.5 GB ( single layer, single sided ) to 17 GB stroage capacity ( double layer, double sided ) |
SVCD
It is an abbr. for "Super Video CD". It uses a compression standard called MPEG-2 to store the video and audio. It has a capacity to hold about 35-60 minutes on 74/80 min CDs of very good quality full-motion video along with up to 2 stereo audio tracks and also 4 selectable subtitles. It is very similar to a VCD, which can be played on many standalone DVD Players and of course on all omputers with a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drive with the help of software based decoder / player. SVCD can provide a much better quality than VCD, especially much more sharpen picture than VCD. But the better quality means that it needs more capacity.
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ASF
It is an abbr. for Advanced System Format, which is used by Windwos Media, Audio and/or Video content compressed with a wide variety of codecs can be stored in an ASF file and played back with the Windows Media Player, streamed with Windows Media Services or optionally packaged with Windows Media Rights Manager. ASF is an extensible file format designed to store synchronized multimedia data. It supports data delivery over a wide variety of networks and protocols while still proving suitable for local playback. ASF supports advanced multimedia capabilities including extensible media types, component download, scaleable media |
VOB
All DVD movies are stored in so-called VOB files. Vob files usually contain multiplexed Dolby Digital Audio and MPEG2 video. Vob Files are called as follows: vts_XX_y.vob where XX represents the title and Y the part of the title. There can be 99 titles and 10 parts, although VTS_XX_0.VOB does never contain any video, usually just menu or navigational information. There's 2 ways to find out which files contain the main movie: First: Play the movie in any DVD player and watch the LED on a standalone or the status window on a software player. Second: The main movie is the largest number of consecutively numbered VOB files. For instance it's vts_05_1.vob, vts_05_2.vob.... vts_05_8.vob
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AVI
It is an abbr. for Audio Video Interleave. It is defined by Microsoft which is a special case of the RIFF ( Resource Interchange File Format ). AVI is the most common format for audio/video data on the PC and is an example of a de facto standard.
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DivX
It is the name of a popular new video codec developed by Divx Inc, which is based on the MPEG-4 compression standard for video. They are usually only a fraction ( around 15% ) of the size of a standard DVD, even at 640x480 resolutions, making them the best home video format thus far. They only take half the time to encode, and yet at the same time is smaller in size than MPEG-1. |
MPEG-1,MPEG-2 and MPEG-4
They are coding formats which provide a coding of moving pictures and associated audio for digital storage media.
MPEG-1 provides single-channel and two-channel coding at different sampling rate ( 32, 44.1and 48kHz ).
MPEG-2 provides a backwards compatible multichannel extension to MPEG-1. It contains 5 main channels plus a ' low frequent enhancement' ( LFE ) channel, and it has an extension of MPEG-1 towards lower sampling.
MPEG-4 is an ISO / IEC standard developed by MPEG and is a new standard of video compression that is both high quality and low bitrate. It provides the standardized technological elements enabling the integration of the production, distribution and content access paradigms of the three fields. |
CLEV (CyberLink Eagle Vision)
A video enhancement technology developed by CyberLink that detects video contents and dynamically adjust brightness, contrast and saturation to give the best picture. See here for more information.
DirectX - Microsoft DirectX is a set of low-level application programming interfaces (APIs) for creating high-performance multimedia applications.
DivX
A brand-name video codec (compression-decompression) technology based on the MPEG-4 standard that compresses video to small size with a high degree of quality.
DVD-R
a DVD format that allows you to write once. It is a competitor of DVD+R, and is therefore not compatible with that format. Some new DVD writers can write in both DVD-R and DVD+R, and most DVD player can read both.
DVD-ROM
a read only DVD format commonly used for distribution of movies (which are more specifically referred to as DVD-Video) and computer games.
H. 264
this new compression format is also referred to a AVC or MPEG4. It compresses video files better than the current formats without sacrificing the quality.
NTSC (National Television Systems Committee)
is a standard format adopted by the FCC for television broadcasts in the United States, Japan, Canada and Mexico. This is commonly referred to as composite video because of the convergence of luminance and color into a single analog signal. NTSC delivers 525 lines of resolution at 30 frames per second.
PAL (Phase Alternation Line)
It is the standard format for television broadcasts in Australia, most Western European, South American and Asian countries. PAL delivers 625 lines of resolution at 25 frames per second.
WMA (Windows Media Audio)
A proprietary streaming audio format typically used to download and play files or to stream contents
WMV (Windows Media Video) - A proprietary streaming audio/video formats typically used to download and play files or to stream contents. |
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Aspect Ratio
The ratio of width versus height (eg. 16:9) - there are 3 main standard in use today, 4:3 (fullscreen - eg. analog TV broadcasts), 16:9 (or 1.85:1 - many new movies and digital TV use this ratio) and 2.35:1 (the standard cinema ratio).
Dolby Digital 5.1
A sound compression routine that compresses the 6 channel soundtrack from movies into a a single digital stream that occupies less space. The 6 channels are : front left, center, front right, rear right, rear left and a LFE channel for deep bass effects. The LFE channel is given the 0.1 rating, thus giving 5.1 channels of discrete CD-Quality audio.
DTS 5.1
A competing format to Dolby Digital, which most regards as having better quality. Not all DVD players (either software, hardware, or standalone) can playback DTS audio tracks, and an external DTS decoder may be needed. DTS offers theater system sound with at least six discrete audio channels but is compressed at a lower rate than Dolby Digital. All DTS DVDs will have a Dolby Digital soundtrack (either stereo or 5.1), so you should still be able to hear something with DTS DVDs.
Decoding
DVD video is encoded in a format where a large amount of video and audio can be stored in relative small space (also called Compression). The video encoding scheme used is MPEG-2 (Motion Picture Expert Group 2) and the audio encoding scheme used is either MPEG-2, DTS or the more common Dolby Digital AC3 (also known as Dolby Digital 5.1).
Hardware Decoder
Uses a PCI decoder card to do the decoding, where the mathematical calculations required to decoder the DVD movie is done on the PCI card. This type of decoder is not heavily dependent on the CPU or the graphic/sound cards.
Software Decoder
Uses "software" to decode a DVD movie. This basically tells the CPU to perform some mathematical calculations to decode the DVD movie file, without any serious help from the video card or the sound card. However, a suitable video card is required to be compatible with the type of software mode needed to draw the video on screen, which in this case is done in hardware overlays.
CLEV (CyberLink Eagle Vision)
A video enhancement technology developed by CyberLink that detects video contents and dynamically adjust brightness, contrast and saturation to give the best picture. See here for more information.
CLMEI (CyberLink Multi-channel Environment Impression)
An audio channel expansion technology developed by CyberLink that converts a stereo audio sound and outputs multiple channels
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CSS (Content Scrambling System)
A technology designed by the motion picture industry, and computer industry, to prevent the illegal copying of the contents stored on DVD discs.
GUI or UI (Graphical user interface)
The appearance or outlook of a given software application. Sometimes referred to as user interface (UI) for short.
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