Home Theater Fundas

By popular demand we've rejuvenated the Home theater 101. This is a most basic article on Home theater, with jargon being busted in the course of the article. If you consider its history, it’s evident that the concept of having a theater in your own home is something that is at least 30 years old, resplendent with insane technological advancements through the years. Yet the basics of it seem to be quite a blur to the consumer, who really wants to just have a blast while watching his/her favorite flick. The types of components available are plenty; the brands can get really obscure and of course there are the hundred reviews that are in your face. The money is saved up or pouring in, and you decide to take the plunge and splurge on a swanky new HT system, gleefully hoping to see Rambo or Neo fire away in your living room, at volumes much louder than required.

But before you go shopping, make sure to know what it is you are getting, not what brand - that is secondary. Right now this article is for just getting a few basics of Home Theater, surround sound, disc formats and the other building blocks that you can use to properly build your zone; presented in quite a straightforward explanation, sign language where possible!

The Source of video
The first thing you need is a player, and even before that is the disc itself. The disc could be a DVD, VCD/ DivX CD and now Blu-ray. DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) is still the most common format of video available for viewers. Film producers engage themselves in making a killer DVD more often than not, filled with extra features and special content related to the movie, so as to feed the viewer with more.  While talking about source video, one major thing must be explained, is the resolution of the video.

Before that a little boring technicalities need to be explained. Digital video (actually any video) is made up of multiple still images moving very fast, thus our eye thinks it's a moving picture, also known as movie. Each of these still images is made up of a collection of small dots that make up the entire image, called the pixel.  

image source

Resolution is the seemingly intimidating specification that you see on TVs and DVDs alike: 640x480, 1920x1080, True HD... ring a bell? Not to worry. Simply put, they are just the number of small dots, or pixels, that it takes to make up the full video frame. Thus the higher the better, your picture is clearer with more minute detail. HD stands for High definition, so that means higher number of pixels to make your picture.

Now the ‘p’ and the ‘i’, as in 480p, 1080i explains how each frame of video is presented on your screen, p is progressive, and i is interlaced. Progressive means the entire image is displayed in one full sweep. Its quite simple. imagine a cartoonist drawing figures in his book, and then flipping the pages fast like in Taare Zameen Par, to form the moving picture. Interlaced is the older way of doing video, when each frame of the video was split into two, with alternate horizontal lines of pixels being put one after another. This was merely done due to bandwidth issues. Nowadays LCD and plasmas, Blu-rays etc are all progressive video. Thus 1080p means a high video resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, and the video is progressively displayed on our screens. What does this last sentence mean in English? Full HD!