ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee)—The ATSC is responsible for providing standards for high definition TV and standard definition TV. In the context of this article, ATSC refers to the digital TV standard for over-the-air digital TV signal.
BDA (Broadcast Driver Architecture)—A Microsoft Windows technology that enables tuner drivers for digital reception from many sources, including audio/video, television, and IP streams.
CPU (Central Processing Unit)—The CPU is the brains of the computer where most of the calculations take place. In terms of computing power, the CPU is the most important part of the computer system.
DDR (Double Data Rate)—A type of SDRAM that supports data transfers on both edges of each clock cycle (the rising and falling edges), effectively doubling the memory chip's data throughput.
DT (Digital Television)—Digital Television is the umbrella category that includes High Definition TV.
GB (Gigabyte)—1,024 megabytes, though often interpreted as approximately one billion bytes.
HD or HDTV (High Definition or High Definition Television)—A new type of television that provides much better resolution than current televisions based on the NTSC standard. This new standard supports a wider screen than NTSC and roughly twice the resolution. To pump this additional data through the narrow TV channels, images are digitized and compressed before they are transmitted and decompressed when they reach the TV.
iDCT—A transformation step commonly used in software that works with different multimedia formats such as MP3, Vorbis, MPEG, or JPEG.
MB (Megabyte)—One million bytes. A byte is the smallest common unit of computer storage.
MCE (Media Center Edition)—A short form reference to the Windows XP Media Center Edition software.
MHz (Megahertz)—One MHz represents one million cycles per second. The speed of microprocessors, buses, and interfaces is measured in megahertz.
MPEG-2 (Moving Pictures Experts Group-2)—A standard of video compression and file format developed by the Moving Pictures Experts Group. MPEG-2 offers video resolutions of 720 x 480 and 128 x 720 at 60 frames per second, with full CD-quality audio.
NTSC (National Television Standards Committee)—The NTSC is responsible for setting television and video standards in the United States (in Europe and much of the rest of the world, the dominant television standards are PAL and SECAM). The NTSC standard for television defines a composite video signal with a refresh rate of 60 half-frames (interlaced) per second. Each frame contains 525 lines and can contain 16 million different colors.
OTA (Over-The-Air)—In the context of this article, over-the-air refers to the type of Digital TV signal that Media Center supports. The use of either an interior or exterior antenna to receive the over-the-air Digital TV signal is required. In some cases, a signal amplifier can be paired with the antenna to increase signal strength.
PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect)—A specification for high-performance, 32-bit or 64-bit input/output (I/O) buses. A PCI bus can be configured dynamically and is designed to be used by devices with high-bandwidth requirements.
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