won’t understand the bitstream and so won’t be able to play the audio or video content. It’s designed this way to make it hard to make unauthorised copies of copy protected content. For delayed live TV recordings the standard allows temporary storage by the PVR (Personal video Recorder) unit for up to 90minutes.
Physical connection/interface: All media is now recorded digitally and the best way to get digital content to a digital display or audio device is digitally. So where possible you want to avoid converting your signal to and from digital and analogue, every conversion results in some degradation in quality. Hence why almost all displays now use either HDMI or DVI as both are digital interfaces and comfortably support 1080 lines of display as required for High Definition (1080p). HDMI has the advantage that it also supports 7.1 audio channels as well, so one neat lead from your HTPC to your TV can transmit both the audio and video content. Most manufacturers also provide DVI to HDMI converters with their graphics cards. The cards also have what are sometimes called HD or S-Video output sockets. These are useful for legacy analogue devices as they can support composite and component video, the latter being the best quality of the two. Component video however was designed for 480 line (480i) displays so if you use this instead of the digital interface you will be getting degraded quality video.
Media formats: There are only four formats we need to worry about CD, DVD, HD-DVD and BluRay. The story with media formats is fairly simple it’s all about storage capacity from CD’s measly 700MB all the way up to Blu-Ray’s 50GB. Blu-Ray has enough storage to be able to