Site Updates: Several important video glossary definitions updated
James Delahunty
13 Jan 2008 4:48
AfterDawn is a relatively large site; especially when you count the handful of individuals that have the task of contributing officially to it and keeping it up to date. Outside of the forums, everything you see has one or more of a small group of people behind it. This presents an obvious problem; the task of keeping everything up-to-date is a nightmare with all we have to cover, and our performance at keeping certain areas of the site up to scratch ranges from bad to worse.
However, with the new year came new opportunities and now we are taking on the challenge of updating quite a bit of the site. In our glossary section, some items have been untouched for the better part of a decade; a slightly embarrassing fact when you see the enormous amounts of automatic cross links from the main site and forums to the glossary section.
It simply was not good enough that a link to the term "1080p" for example, would bring up just two lines of text telling you the resolution of 1080p and nothing else. So, our small team of English writers is taking on the challenge of getting this section of the site, along with others, up-to-date to regain a reputation we once held, and maintain those we still grasp.
So, my friends, I hope this is to be the first of hundreds of Update notifications you get from us in the coming months. We hope you are all having as good a start to the New Year as we are!
Rich (Vurbal) has updated several important English glossary terms that relate to video that are worth mentioning. Here they are...
- 1080i - 1080i refers to an interlaced HDTV signal with 1080 horizontal lines and an Aspect ratio of 16:9 (1.78:1). All major HDTV broadcasting standards include a 1080i format which has a Resolution of 1920x1080, however there are other formats... Read more.
- 1080p - 1080p refers to a progressive HDTV signal with 1080 horizontal lines and an Aspect Ratio of 16:9 (1.78:1). All major HDTV broadcasting standards include a 1080i format which has a resolution of 1920x1080, but the progressive HDTV broadcast standards... Read more
- 16:9 - 16:9 refers to an Aspect ratio (AR) with a height that's 9/16 the width. It's also commonly referred to as 1.78:1 or simply 1.78, in reference to the width being approximately 1.78 times the height. When a HDTV display is referred to as Widescreen it almost always implies this AR... Read more
- 720p - 720p refers to a progrssive HDTV signal with 720 horizontal lines and an Aspect Ratio (AR) of 16:9 (1.78:1). All major HDTV broadcasting standards include a 720p format which has a resolution of 1280x720, however there are other formats... Read more
- AVI - AVI, which stands for Audio Video Interleave, is a Container format used by Microsoft's Video for Windows multimedia framework. Since it was developed for Windows 3.1 in 1992 it lacks some features found in newer containers like MPEG or MP4, but is still widely... Read more
- Container - A container is a special file format used either to store a single video or audio stream, or to interleave one or more video and audio streams. Containers may also hold other streams, such as the still images used for subtitles and menu highlights on DVDs... Read more
- 2:3 Pulldown - 2:3 Pulldown is a Pulldown pattern designed to imitate the telecine pattern used when transferring film to video tape for NTSC broadcasts. It can be used to convert to actual NTSC framerates of 29.97fps when starting with video running at 23.976fps... Read more
- 3GP - 3GP is the name for both a video standard designed for mobile phones and the name of the Container used to store video used in the standard. It was developed by a group of companies and standards organizations from Europe, North America, and Asia called... Read more
- 4:3 - 4:3 refers to an Aspect ratio (AR) with a height that's 3/4 the width. It's also commonly referred to as 1.33:1 or simply 1.33, in reference to the width being approximately 1.33 times the height. This AR is also commonly referred to as fullscreen, referring to the fact that video... Read more
We hope these are informative to you or good enough for you to pass to anyone seeking any of the above information. Our goal is to pack a decent amount of information into our Glossary entries and to provide links to as many tools, guides and other items as possible. If you want to help us with our Glossary section, then please suggest terms that we are missing by clicking here.
All feedback is welcome. We are particularly interested in seeing comments posted to the updated Glossary. Expect more updates shortly...