COM Port: A serial port located on the back of your computer for
attaching a modem, plotter, printer or mouse to the system.
Composite video: Composite video encodes luminance and
chrominance information into one signal. VHS and 8mm are
formats that record and play back composite video.
Compression: A method for making files smaller in size. There are
two types of compression: lossless and lossy. Files compressed with
a lossless scheme can be restored unchanged from their original
state. Lossy schemes discard data during compression, so some
image quality is sacrificed. The loss of quality may be negligible or
severe depending on the amount of compression.
Cropping: Choosing the area of an image to be displayed.
Data rate: The quantity of data transmitted per unit time; for
example, the number of bytes read from or written to a hard drive
per second, or the amount of video data processed per second.
Data transfer rate: The measurement of the speed at which
information passes between the storage device (e.g. CD-ROM or
hard drive) and the display device (e.g. monitor or MCI device).
Depending on the devices used, some transfer rates may offer better
performance than others.
DCT: Discrete Cosine Transformation – part of JPEG image
data compression and related algorithms. The brightness and color
information is saved as a frequency coefficient.
DirectShow: System extension by Microsoft for multimedia
applications under Windows. ActiveMovie
DirectMedia: System extension by Microsoft for multimedia
applications under Windows. ActiveMovie
DirectX: A bundle of several system extensions developed by
Microsoft for Windows 95 and its successors to make possible video
and game acceleration.
Dissolve: A transitional effect in which the video is faded from one
scene to the next.
