Watching TV on your computer is becoming more and more commonplace, but the next step in home entertainment is finding a way to get Internet video, including streaming programs, video podcasts, and paid downloaded shows and movies, to play on your actual television. While it is possible today with a variey of hardware and software […]
Video has been on the Internet for a long time. Until recently, however, it was mostly limited to short video clips or tiny picture windows on the webpage. Today’s broadband connections now make it possible to stream higher quality video in real time. Most everyone has heard of YouTube.com, which became a phenomenon of user-generated […]
Digital Rights Management, often abbreviated DRM, is a technology that publishers and producers of digital media use to limit the way you can play their media. In the non-digital world, it would be as if you had to sign an agreement whenever you purchased something for your home. For example, suppose you purchased a nice […]
BitTorrent is a specialized method of a larger process called peer-to-peer file sharing. Peer-to-peer (often abbreviated and pronounced P2P) is the term used to describe a method of file transfer that goes from one user (a peer) to another user (a peer), without using a computer server in the middle. A typical home network, where […]
Data compression is a function performed by computers to decrease the size of a data file, while controlling the amount of information that gets lost. The purpose of data compression is to reduce the amount of space required to store the file and to reduce the bandwidth required to transfer the file.
With audio files, especially […]
By February, 2009, all television stations in the US are required by federal law to convert their over-the-air analog broadcasts to digital television (DTV) broadcasts. However, there is a lot of misinformation going around with regard to what that transition means to the consumer.
First of all, the transition will only impact free over-the-air broadcasts via […]
Blu-ray Disc (abbreviated either BD or BRD) is the brand name for a new type, or format, of optical media disc. Blu-ray discs are the same physical size as standard CDs and DVDs and look very similar. Its name comes from the fact that it uses a blue laser (actually the violet spectrum) to read […]
High-definition television (often shortened to high-def or abbreviated HDTV) refers to the increased level of detail and clarity which is possible on the latest generation of television displays.
Of course, terms like high definition are always relative to the previous technology, just as high fidelity audio in the 1950s was better than its predecessor, but not […]
The difference between an analog broadcast and a digital broadcast is difficult to explain without some prior knowledge of how radio and television signals get from the tower to your home in the first place. Suffice it to say that broadcast signals are a type of electromagnetic wave that carries data through space. How far […]
Size, compression, and resolution are three characteristics which determine the quality of a digital photograph. The size of a digital photo is usually expressed in terms of pixel dimensions, such as 1024 x 768. The quality of digital cameras is usually expressed in megapixels, which represents one million photo sensors in the camera.
While megapixels and […]