Technical Details About Digital DVD Players

Have you ever wondered why the DVD is so popular a medium? Moreover, it is interesting to note that in the recent times the sale of Digital DVD players have increased manifold.

The reason for such widespread popularity is awesome quality both in video and in audio. A DVD movie is compressed in a high bit rate video and audio. If one compares the encoding format of a DVD and CD, the previous generation movie storing device, then it would be found that the two encoding formats are entirely different from each other.

A CD movie is compressed using the MPEG 1 compression technique. If the bit rate is increased, it gives a higher quality video file. Due to constraints in resolution, a MPEG 1 file cannot go over 352 x 288 pixels in a CD. The CD player also does not support playing a CD which is compressed using a higher resolution.

To play a DVD, we need Digital DVD players. The term “DVD” is an acronym of Digital Video Disk. Digital DVD Players play disks made using two technical standards of DVD video and DVD audio. The player hardware has to be connected to output hardware, preferably a Television set. There are some portable players with a small LCD screen attached, but they fail to play the DVD to its full potential due to hardware portability restrictions.

Digital DVD players have to perform some basic tasks like reading a DVD in ISO or UDF 1.2 format. It can optionally decrypt the packed data using CSS and/or Macrovision. Every DVD has a protection code called the Regional Lockout Code. It limits the DVD manufactured in a certain portion of the world to be played in that part of the world only. The DVD player has the capability of changing the regional code, but it is only limited to 5 changes and no more. After that, the player will not play DVDs from other regions.

Digital DVD players have the ability to decode MPEG 2 video streams with maximum 10 Mbit/s of data. It is the peak range; for a continuous output, the data rate is 8 Mbit/s. Sound is decoded from the MP2, PCM or AC3 format. The video resolution that can be obtained from this high quality data is quite high. The maximum video resolution is 720×576.

Apart from playing DVDs, digital DVD players can play some other formats as well. They can play audio CDs, with formats such as CDDA, mp3, etc. They can also play the earlier generation CDs, that is the Video CD format. They also have the capability to play DTS, the Dolby Digital Theater System. The home cinema decoder is one of the main features of a digital DVD player. Apart from the formats mentioned above, some newer formats are coming to bolster the video scene.

All the formats are variants of MPEG, as the x264 is the MPEG 4, layer 10. Another popular compression method is the MPEG 4 ASP compression, more popularly known as DivX. PC DVD ROM players can play almost all the formats out there.

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Cd/dvd Formats. Conversion From Analogue to Digital and the Future of Digital Media Storage

Digital data is different from analogue data, because there is usually very little data loss that occurs. Compare cassette tapes and audio CDs, the analogue tape has a series of frequency curves that tell the speakers what sounds to emit through an amplifier. CDs do much the same except data is contained in binary form (i.e. zeros and ones) the device or player recognises these zeros and ones and arranges them into a frequency pattern which is then transferred through to the speakers. Basically it is the same process as with a tape except with one extra step – converting from binary code into frequency curves. So while tapes get stretched and damaged, the frequency curves embedded on the film deteriorates. Whereas this hardly ever occurs with CDs because the data is stored behind Perspex and it’s hard to change a zero to a one (and vice-versa.)

But what is binary? As I said before, it is either a zero or a one – but how is this done I hear you ask. Well binary code is generated most commonly with lasers or magnets and is why we call media “digital.” Digital media encompasses all CDs, DVDs, Hard Disc Drives (computers), iPods etc. For CDs, a laser will burn a microscopic “dot” in the media which a device will identify as a “one.” All other sections that the laser does not burn are read as a “zero.” Hence binary code is made! Magnetic media works in a similar way except instead of burning dots, the drive will change the magnetic field at a particular segment to make a “one.”

So what does this all mean to you? Not much really, except that it helps to conceptualise the differences in formats each media possesses…

Audio/Video vs. Data

CDs come most commonly in CD-R, CD-RW, CD-ROM and VCD format and can fit 700MB on a disc as a data CD or 80 minutes as an audio CD. The confusing part is how do audio CDs and data CDs differ? Firstly is not the actual media that is different, but the way in which the data is written on the disc. Audio CDs have to be readable by a CD player, so there was a standard made so that all audio CDs would be created in such a way that a player anywhere in the world could understand. This differs from Data CDs where any type of file can be copied to a CD, including word documents, images, music etc. What! Music on a data CD? Yes it’s true; remember when you decided to back up your old CD albums onto your computer? – Well you probably used a program like Windows Media Player or iTunes to “rip” the songs to your computer from the CD. When this happens, the audio from the CDs is converted to a format on your computer that minimises space requirements. Popular formats (or codec’s) include MP3, WMA, OGG and AAC. So instead of storing a whopping 700MB per album, you can decrease the amount to as low as 50MBs per album without too much reduction in sound quality. The difference with copying music onto a data CD is that the music will still be in one of the audio formats you used such as MP3 and hence unreadable by conventional CD players.

DVDs are much the same deal except with a video component: DVD players (like CD players) will only read DVD Video files that are arranged in a way it can understand. Data DVDs can store any type of file you want. Popular DVD formats are DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD-RAM which store about 4.7GB on a Data DVD or 60 minutes on a DVD video. However you can increase the number of minutes on a video DVD by reducing its quality (which you cannot do for an audio CD.) So it still arranges the files for a DVD player except the size (aspect ratio-wise) of the video becomes smaller and hence blurry when viewed. Manufacturers have made a DVD that has 2 layers called DVD-DL (or DVD – Dual Layer) which doubles the capacity of conventional DVDs so you can fit more video onto a disc without the need to decrease the quality. Almost all DVDs that are sold today are on DVD-DLs. You can also copy videos onto a data DVD, except these will be in a compressed format such as an AVI or MPEG – comparable to an MP3 or WMA file for music.

So what’s the future of digital storage? Blu-ray is a new type of disc which is just starting to become popular it makes use of a blue laser (which has a smaller wavelength) to write data onto its surface hence increasing the disc capacity up to 25GB and 50GB on a dual layer disc. Ideally, this type of disc should have been made instead of regular DVDs for its obvious benefits – but when DVDs were first invented there was no need of a 25GB disc so the current DVDs were the cheaper and the most obvious choice. Blu-ray will eventually succeed DVD as DVD did VHS and CD did to cassette.

CDs will likely remain common as they are roughly the amount of space needed to fit a song album on. If manufacturers decided to increase the capacity of audio CDs, then there would be compatibility issues with existing players and lots of space would go to waste as most artists will not produce albums that would exceed audio CD capacity anyway.

Interesting sidenotes:

MP3 CDs are CDs that are a cross-between audio CDs and Data CDs. A relatively new CD player can support MP3 CDs but all files on the disc must be converted to MP3 format first. This increases the amount of songs you can fit on one CD.

CD quality – this means the CDs you buy from an outlet – is considered to be infinite. However when you rip CDs to your computer you lose quality by reducing the space it requires; so when you convert these files and burn them to an audio CD again, it is not the same quality as the original. Likewise for DVDs. The only way to keep the original quality is to actually copy CD to CD using burning software such as Nero or rip using a lossless encoder and burn from there.

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Will tapes and DVD’s manufactured now still work after the digital conversion of next February?

I’ve been told all tapes and DVD’s bought now or any time before the conversion won’t be playable. I have many DVD’s and some tapes as well but am leary of buying any more now if this rumor is true.


Do you agree with this list that boasts the best song of all time as stairway to heaven?

What is the cheapest digital camera with a swivel LCD screen?

And maybe links to where I could buy one (online is preferable). I want a digital camera with at least 5 mega pixels and like I said a swivel/tilt and twist LCD screen. Or some variation of that, I want to be able to take pictures at weird angles but know what the picture will look like before I take it. Thanks!


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The Real World of Digital Music Production

The “diarrhea” of “an awful lot of” contemporary “pop, rap & rock” music (but not all!)

Do you know what happens when you live on a diet of processed entrees and fast food? When never a fresh fruit or vegetable passes your lips and your fiber count is measured in “mgs” instead of grams? You guessed it: that horrible “D” word. Also known in medical circles as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) –

So what’s up with the computer spew of 75% of many contemporary popular artists? They, say the song is dead; well who killed it? Was it the independent label music movement? Certainly NOT! Was it rap, punk, or grunge or whatever? I’d say, could be. Was it Madonna who first put the crack in “The Wall” of song composing and instrument playing that earlier generations so carefully began brick by brick? I don’t know — for you, but for me, it’s been a downhill ride since 1984.

I was one, well, that was at “the roots of rock” sort of speak (thanks to an older sister who took me to the Fillmore East in New York City at age 14) – I was naïve enough to ask about that “funny smelling smoke” and those funny looking cigarettes; I later thanked her, for I saw “Santana” live there when their second album (Black Magic Woman) hadn’t even hit the shelves.

I saw PINK FLOYD at that venue a year later when they were still called: The Pink Floyd and they had an opening act play before they came out (i.e. later when fame hit: Pink Floyd ALWAYS played alone because of their massive WALL of speakers and equipment.)

I saw bands in New York City that are now relics: Procol Harum, Jethro Tull’s first incarnation, YES, Bob Dylan WITH “The Band”!! – even Black Sabbath after their 1st LP; and, “Mott the Hoople” touring their FIRST LP. (Remember them? –an LP is an old vinyl record that was played on a turntable. YOU didn’t “use the turntable to scratch! – And they made crackling and popping sounds. LONG LIVE THE CD! And the mp3 too) But, I digress…

So where is this blog heading?

Today you can record and cut a CD in your bedroom. Then, (IF you have enough friends and a gig someplace – or JUST USE U-Tube) you can SELL CDs to YOUR FANS, if you can GET ENOUGH, you’ll even make money; MAYBE! It can all be done on your HOME Computer. And why, because YOU are a musician? “Frankly NOT my dear” as Gable used to say. (Gable who? say the younger readers?) It’s all virtual marketing after that…

In case you’re still naïve as to how IT is done – that so many of today’s artists may not need to know almost anything about music, let alone, spend years playing an instrument or singing – and yet get on the “Virtual Airwaves” and even end up on the Today show spot, along with the “singing babies” that periodically appear on the internet sites and on “You-Tube”. Well it doesn’t even take “RC’s” [read Record Companies] Perhaps just a shrewd “Boomer or GenX” Mom/Dad Manager)… Yep, it’s “Performance Now” and there’s very little music to worry those Artists about. The RC’s can still get their cut and have absolutely NO REASON to complain!!! – About the “Indie and Virtual Music artists” wrecking their profit.

THEY helped “build the beast” they fear everyday (and I hope it does eat their Creator like a type of “Cannibal Baby” gone wild).

And “they” profit everyday by the existence of a youth-culture fueled “Music” industry who’s “Heart & Soul” is made up of the “clinking, clacking, metallic empty banging” of a musical palette of sounds that is “as Soul-LESS” as the heart of the “King Beast” himself (you know that Devil “Sam” who is lurking behind everybody’s dream of a “musical-career “Garden of Eden”) –

As for those “Singing Babies” and “Parading Sex-Toy Imagery of “Twelve-year+ something” girly-woman – parading across the video screens of Virtual and TV America (every so often) THEY, and those nice Boomer+ parents, are just hoping a couple will spell “C.A.S.H.” BIG TIME! – This is of course, once their product “Goes Viral…”

And so many of u“You-tubers,” (particularly) the older viewers will be “fooled-again” – having, (in anemic mental-lapses) forgotten the “Anthem of YOUR Youth: “We Won’t Be Fooled Again” (Who?); and, all those “smashing guitars” instead of “Smashing ‘those damn’ Pumpkins” (now Geriatric!)…

All BECAUSE “U” don’t have the “dog-damn” SOFTWARE that I just have to throw in the garbage! (I made a resolve NOT to swear lately, I don’t want to break my will just yet) – nothing against “dog’s really! – Though I am sort-of “one of those cat-guys”…Please don’t message my email, I LOVE animals with four-legs and some with two. (It’s spiders and insects with multiple legs that have been giving me the creeps lately, but then I live in a “real FOREST”…

It came in MARCH: The last “music equipment purchase I knew I was going to be able to make for quite sometime unless, – MY CD goes “Viral” – (highly unlikely as I don’t own a Video camera or even a digital camera) It will be tough to get on YOU-Tube or even MySpace Music with my “old-fashioned music-making way” (and so MUCH profitless Work – not to mention that! – Unpaid labor, hardly worth it) – but that’s aside the point:

In March (as I said), I bought a $100 desktop “plastic” 2-octave Midi Controller” keyboard with my last savings, (2 octaves means that it only has 25 black & white piano-looking keys) and along with that came (from this decptive “kraut” company) the: “Virtual Music Starter Desktop Composing Package” (a VMSDCP (!)) complete with 50 of the “Latest” Digital Virtual Sounds and Samples (your DVSS’s!) that I thought my music was lacking(?!) – Or perhaps, I had a series of “faithless” self-doubts and collapse of my initial musical resolve formed so long ago in those many long hours and days behind “My Old Black & White”…But again, I digress:

So although the keyboard will be minimally useful at my computer desktop for editing and notation work, those wonderfully and cleverly named (and they really are!) modern sound samples have yet to be able to even be tested out with this “rat-like” maze of a software package! “They” (the Kraut Company) sent me for my $100 apparently a bunch of “demo-software” that ‘They” never even paid for – unfortunately you can’t do much with it! – If only after loading the .dll files I could hear the damn things on a reliable basis. But yes, I do like the names: i.e. Delay Lama, B-Assault, AManalogWar, etc – endlessly creative really!

So when I finally got a few to sound after much frustration the musical use was questionable, (for me I mean); unless you are purposely avoiding any musical references. But most of all, there was this “ambience of artificiality about them all” – This is the “so called musical world” we are abandoning our youth to, (I philosophically reflected, as I endlessly clicked and re-clicked the samples with my mouse trying to get them to sound). “This is a world where a real guitar or piano is mostly a “prop” –

Somehow every sound seemed to me the equivalent of “those frozen-processed entrees” Once in a while, a nice touch to a busy life and schedule; eat them regularly and “disease” is sure to get deeply-rooted with time.

OK so I’m not too fond of today’s musical sound palette, but it’s not just that:

The “composing software and the music software” that is the foundation of so much of the rock and pop that even comes out of the big studios today is not something that “miffs me” (believe me, I AM NOT that “old fashioned” I just like old 40’s movies). I understand it only too well; way back in the 1980’s when many of today’s young artists where still their “daddy’s sperm” beginning that long swim up their “mother’s canal”, I spent untold hours hunched over then “modern synthesizers” creating such effects and sounds; BUT by myself, with only the good old tech manual and use of dials, filters, oscillators… and so forth.

Today’s gig>>> You no longer compose music (especially from “your musical soul”) you download and merge the “pre-found” clips and beats included in the package. A “Soulless” and “Joyless” process in my opinion BUT not necessarily an instant, easy one. The “Result”? Everything you create has this “virtual stamp” on it and sounds like every other “voice in the box.” True, you shape it but hardly worth the learning curve to me.

As (the) PINK FLOYD predicted way back in ‘74 with their song: “Welcome to the Machine” ) from the album: “Wish You Were Here” the machine is now as a voice and its soul is in the “box” even if you try to musically think “outside the box”…And believe me: I loved MY PINK FLOYD… and English bands in particular. Their foresight is now come to pass (meaning: it is now true in reality what was fantasy in their lyrics)…“Welcome to the Digital Soul”>>>

So from the “soul-less” world of contemporary modern desktop composing, I now fondly bid you adieu… I and “my lonely soul” like a musical Henry Thoreau at some far-away “Walden Pond” on a frontier far from the “modern world” return to my “Digital Piano” that at least has 88 “real-action” keys and perhaps later tonight to “My Old Black & White” (still resting peacefully in my kitchen foyer). I played the theme to my song: My Old Black & White on it the other day, she sounded pretty good considering “she” hasn’t been tuned since my then 86-year-old piano tuner died (I think in 2002).

My old black and white, Greets me with silence, every night.
And whenever I walk through that door;
She’s been my friend now since ‘74
She’s still my old black & white
And though her keys no longer shine so bright,
She’s kept me company (through) many a lonely night.
She’s still my old black & white

I posed for the above picture the day of a concert I played for over 35 people in a log cabin, called “The Music Shed” in Cummington, Mass., A nice open-air mountain town of New England.

I was 30 then and I remember it as passing as briefly as a “summer day” in New England. The last year my body would be unmarred by “the needles of dialysis” and the ensuing struggle of the next twenty years of poverty and struggle to keep myself faithful to my chosen goal and commitment: to learn to play a REAL PIANO. I thought it was just the beginning of long and fruitful career doing this; but I hadn’t seen my latest blood reports….

It was a glorious June Day in the New England mountains and I played a grand piano, very well indeed…

My bio is where you can read more about my music and find links to listen and purchase my CDs: August Ocean Overture, and In Memory Only

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How much does it cost to replace an lcd screen on a digital camera?

I just dropped my fujifilm finepix s700 and the lcd screen is messed up. It’s white with black spotches at the top and lines. I know it’s busted. That’s the only thing wrong, the messed up screen. I know it won’t be cheap but how much would it cost to replace an lcd screen on my camera?


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