compressed

What's lossless audio and do I need it?

Digital Living A process is used when music is compressed into MP3 to discard all the sounds a machine thinks the human ear can't audibly perceive, thus vastly reducing the amount of storage needed to hold entire albums.

18 July 2007, 11:55

Blu-ray and HD DVD: The facts

Digital Living Watch the standard DVD edition on a big TV and Kong's fur will be a largely indistinct mass of dark grey and black; the buildings and streets of Manhattan, lying in the background, will be slightly fuzzy; and behind them, you'll notice little...

1 June 2007, 16:40

Why isn't Freeview on LCD and plasmas as good as on my old TV?

Digital Living Put simply, there are too many channels compressed into the available space on Freeview -- while digital TV can produce a very good image, if it's too highly compressed the quality is severely degraded and will look poor when upscaled to a large...

25 April 2007, 11:42

Do I need to pay more than £30 for earphones?

Digital Living If you only listen to highly compressed MP3s or FM radio, don't bother spending more than about 30 quid. Heavily compressed music will only ever sound mediocre, and expensive earphones will actually make their inferiority more audible to you.

Tags: noise, compressed, speaker, pair

17 October 2007, 14:30

Three ways to capture video from the Internet

Digital Living Flash Video makes highly-compressed streaming video possible, and many Web sites use it because it displays well in most browsers. If you're a regular YouTube viewer, you've probably experienced the frustration of trying to save your favourite videos.

10 August 2006, 14:14

Which MP3 bit rate should I use?

Digital Living Although lossless audio is still compressed, it's done so using a complex algorithm that retains every single bit of data while still managing to reduce file sizes. I want to use MP3s on a music player but I have no idea which bit rate to use.

16 May 2007, 14:24

How to clean your digital SLR camera

Digital Living Never use compressed air on the sensor -- it will freeze on the sensor surface, possibly causing very serious damage. You open your camera to the elements every time you change the lens, and dust or grit can sidle in there to sabotage your images.

17 September 2007, 10:55

Do more with your iPod

Digital Living Because WAVs and AIFFs are uncompressed and, therefore, much bigger than compressed files, they prevent your iPod from using its cache effectively, so the hard disk has to work much harder. It's easy enough to synchronise both iPods with just one...

9 May 2005, 14:49