Japan had pioneered HDTV for decades with an analogue implementation. However, both it and a similar attempt in Europe ultimately failed. Japan again took the lead in digital HDTV, this time along … [Continue reading]
Widescreen Digital Video
There are quite a few digital channels transmitting widescreen programmes and movies for viewers with a widescreen television and the general trend is clearly towards the introduction of widescreen … [Continue reading]
Digital Video Television Sound
The standard sound format for European digital television comes in the form of MPEG-2 Stereo. This system can carry two channels of CD quality digital audio. The quality of audio this delivers is little different to that possible using the NICAM … [Continue reading]
Digital Broadcasting
In Europe the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) project was set up in 1993 and came from a market led perception that digital broadcasting to the home needed technical standards of transmission to … [Continue reading]
The Evolution of Digital Video
Evolution The digitisation of TV can be traced back a quarter of a century to the first digital video effects box, which scaled and rotated live images. This was followed by many expensive digital … [Continue reading]
Digital Video Television
Digital TV For years, the broadcasting and computer industries have proclaimed that "convergence" was just around the corner. Both have had different things in mind, of course, and each has claimed to be the driving … [Continue reading]
Digital Video Format Comparison
Formats comparison The principal technical characteristics of the digital video formats discussed above are summarised in the following table: VCD SVCD X(S)VCD DivX DV DVD Formal … [Continue reading]
Digital Video Format
In the late 1990s a new generation of entirely digital cameras and camcorders emerged, and with it a new video format, Digital Video (DV). The DV cassette is a small, metal-oxide … [Continue reading]
DivX
According its pseudonymous authors the DivX codec - no relation to Circuit City's now defunct DIVX digital video disk player - is based on Microsoft's MPEG-4 video technology, with the addition of an … [Continue reading]
miniDVD
If SVCD can be viewed as format that seeks to combine the advantages of DVD quality with the cheapness of writable CD media, then miniDVD can be viewed in a similar light. The miniDVD format goes … [Continue reading]