Filter
Top Products
Appendix D • Glossary of Terms
The letterbox method produces a black band at the top and
bottom of the screen, wasting the television's vertical resolution.
AVI – Refers to Audio Video Interleaved, the original term for
Microsoft’s Video For Windows.
Bandwidth – The amount of data being able to transmit during
a defined period of time. For digital devices, the bandwidth is
usually expressed in bits per second or bytes per second. For
analog devices, the bandwidth is expressed in cycles per second
or Hertz (Hz).
B Frames – Bi-directional frames; one of the three picture types
in MPEG compression. B frames are coded in relation to
previous or subsequent I or P frames. B frames do not serve as a
reference for other frames.
Bit Stream – A serial sequence of bits.
Bitmap – An image made up of pixels on the screen, stored as a
collection of bits. A bitmap file usually carries the extension
BMP.
Bits per Pixel – The number of bits used to represent the color
value of each pixel in a digitized image. The color value of
pixels can be 8, 16 or 24 bits. When the color value of a pixel is
24 bits there are 16.6 million colors in an image.
Bridge – A network component connecting two LANs, thus
extending the range of the network. Bridges check data and
forward them across LANs.
Brightness – The brightness of a picture describes how much
light appears to be emitted from it.
Broadcast – Transmitting data simultaneously to several or all
stations within a network.
Brouter – A network component that serves as both a Bridge
and a Router.
Buffer – Space being allocated on a system’s Random Access
Memory (RAM) where data are temporarily stored until being
transferred to another part of the system. In streaming
126