Search Results for: label/home%20cinema

Rather than put­ting a blogroll wid­get on the menus which takes up space on every page, we have instead decided to have a ded­ic­ated page with a list and descrip­tion of the sites we reg­u­larly vis­it.  We recom­mend all the fol­low­ing from per­son­al exper­i­ence — there are no sponsored links here.

TheHTPC.net

Run by anoth­er Jon this is the closest to a “sis­ter” site to DIYMH in our opin­ion.  Des­pite some tech­nic­al wobbles in early 2012 the site is now fully back up and being reg­u­larly updated with excel­lent HTPC related articles.

Anandtech

Well known tech­no­logy news & review site primar­ily focused on reviews of PC hard­ware.  Unlike many of the oth­ers has remained con­sist­ent and clear without sug­ges­tion of any “paid-reviews” or oth­er dodgy influ­ence.  Provides more cov­er­age of home media tech­no­lo­gies than most oth­er sites.

SemiAccurate

Tech­no­logy tabloid.  Openly biased and some­times bor­der­line trolling but an enter­tain­ing read with some impress­ive insight at times.

Digital Photography Review

The most com­pre­hens­ive and thor­ough reviews of digit­al cam­er­as on the web.  Includes all the latest digit­al cam­era reviews and digit­al ima­ging news, lively dis­cus­sion for­ums, vast samples gal­ler­ies etc…

DIY Audio

The home for audi­o­philes on the web.  A com­munity ded­ic­ated to help­ing every­one learn the art of audio. Pro­jects by fan­at­ics, for fan­at­ics!  Con­tains thou­sands of dis­cus­sions and prob­ably all there is to know about modi­fy­ing HiFi

Doom9

Tech­nic­al for­um, mainly a DVD backup resource. Cov­ers top­ics like video cap­ture, MPEG encod­ing and transcod­ing, video fil­ter­ing and format conversion.

GSM Arena

Com­pre­hens­ive and up-to-date inform­a­tion and reviews for just about every mobile tele­phone ever made.  Espe­cially use­ful for com­par­ing spe­cific­a­tions of new and upcom­ing handsets.

Hack Windows 7 Media Center

An almost-sis­ter-site to DIYMH.  Provides lots of detailed inform­a­tion about Win­dows Media Cen­ter on Win­dows 7.  Describes itself as “Using plu­gins, pro­grams, tools and hacks to cre­ate a bet­ter Win­dows 7 Media Center.”

Silent PC Review

Site ded­ic­ated to quiet com­put­ing.  The stand­ard an depth of reviews is second to none.  If you’re look­ing for inform­a­tion about PSU’s, fans or HDDs this is the place to go.  Describes itself as “Everything about low-noise PC com­pon­ents, silen­cing tech­niques, DIY mods and com­plete quiet com­puter systems.”

Video Help

Con­tains a wealth of guides to con­vert­ing between video formats.  Describes itself as “How to make a VCD, inform­a­tion about soft­ware play­ers, down­loads, DivX and a for­um with tips on cre­at­ing DVD and VCD movies.”

XDA Developers

Home to Android & Win­dows Phone apps, mods, roms and devel­op­ment.  If you want a new ROM for your phone or you want to hack it in some way this is the place to go.

Tech Stream

Web devel­op­ment inform­a­tion with par­tic­u­larly good inform­a­tion on fea­tures and uses of the new HTML5 and CSS3 standards.

W3Schools

Com­pre­hens­ive guide to all HTML and CSS ver­sions and tags.  Includes inform­a­tion on browser compatibility

How data is stored in a multimedia file

Files on a com­puter (or on an optic­al disk like DVD or BluRay) need to con­tain more than 1 type of data.  A typ­ic­al movie will include at least 1 video “stream” and one audio “stream”.  Most movies include mul­tiple lan­guages and sub­titles, each of which requires an addi­tion­al stream.  Each of these streams is effect­ively a file in its own right, but they are all stored togeth­er with­in a “con­tain­er” which also starts each of them at the right time (sub­titles don’t start imme­di­ately at the start of a movie for example) and keeps them in sync as well as stor­ing meta-data about each of them – i.e. what lan­guage they are, what fram­er­ate and res­ol­u­tion the video is, and what com­pres­sion stand­ards have been used.

Video streams

Video streams con­tain only the video part of the movie.  They are com­pressed using a par­tic­u­lar sys­tem and there should be meta-data about their res­ol­u­tion, fram­er­ate, if they are inter­laced or pro­gress­ive and details of the encod­ing sys­tem used.

Audio streams

Audio streams con­tain only the audio part of the movie.  There are usu­ally mul­tiple audio streams included with the movie and each has its own stream.  They can be com­pressed in a range of ways or in some cases they are uncom­pressed raw audio.  There should be meta-data about their bitrate, res­ol­u­tion, lan­guage, num­ber of chan­nels and details of the encod­ing sys­tem used.

Oth­er streams (e.g. Closed Captions)

Many movies con­tain oth­er streams, most com­monly closed cap­tions (also known as sub­titles).  These come in sev­er­al formats, but are typ­ic­ally just text with time stamps.  They are so small rel­at­ively that no com­pres­sion is used.  There should be meta-data about their language.
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Con­tain­ers which bundle all the streams together

All of the streams that com­prise the movie are bundled togeth­er and kept in sync by a con­tain­er.  The con­tain­er should con­tain (and provide) all the meta-data about each stream.  The con­tain­er also enables the col­lec­tion of streams to be stored as a single file.  The most com­mon con­tain­er formats are VOB (used by DVD) and M2TS (used by BluRay).  Oth­er com­mon con­tain­er formats on PC are TS, MPEG, AVI, MKV, WMV, WTV, DVR-MS and MP4.  The obsol­ete HD-DVD format used EVO containers.