Television (TV) is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome (black-and-white) or colored,

with accompanying sound. "Television" may also refer specifically to a television set, television programming, television transmission. The etymology of the word has a mixed Latin and Greek origin, meaning "far sight": Greek tele (), far, and Latin visio, sight (from video, vis- to see, or to view in the first person). Commercially available since the late 1920s, the television set has become commonplace in homes, businesses and institutions, particularly as a vehicle for advertising, a source of entertainment, and news. Since the 1970s the availability of video cassettes, laserdiscs, DVDs and now Blu-ray Discs, have resulted in the television set frequently being used for viewing recorded as well as broadcast material. In recent years Internet television has seen the rise of television available via the Internet, e.g. iPlayer and Hulu. Although other forms such as closed-circuit television (CCTV) are in use, the most common usage of the medium is for broadcast television, which was modeled on the existing radio broadcasting systems developed in the 1920s, and uses high-powered radio-frequency transmitters to broadcast the television signal to individual TV receivers. The broadcast television system is typically disseminated via radio transmissions on designated channels in the 54 890 MHz frequency band.[1] Signals are now often transmitted with stereo and/or surround sound in many countries. Until the 2000s broadcast TV programs were generally transmitted as an analog television signal, but in recent years public broadcasting and commercial broadcasting have been progressively introducing digital television (DTV) broadcasting technology. A standard television set comprises multiple internal electronic circuits, including those for receiving and decoding broadcast signals. A visual display device which lacks a tuner is properly called a video monitor, rather than a television. A television system may use different technical standards such as digital television (DTV) and highdefinition television (HDTV). Television systems are also used for surveillance, industrial process control, and guiding of weapons, in places where direct observation is difficult or dangerous. Amateur television (ham TV or ATV) is also used for non-commercial experimentation, pleasure and public service events by amateur radio operators. Ham TV stations were on the air in many cities before commercial TV stations came on the air.[2] Main article: History of television In its early stages of development, television employed a combination of optical, mechanical and electronic technologies to capture, transmit and display a visual image. By the late 1920s, however, those employing only optical and electronic technologies were being explored. All modern television systems rely on the latter, although the knowledge gained from the work on electromechanical systems was crucial in the development of fully electronic television.

Braun HF 1 television receiver, Germany, 1958

The first images transmitted electrically were sent by early mechanical fax machines, including the pantelegraph, developed in the late nineteenth century. The concept of electrically powered transmission of television images in motion was first sketched in 1878 as the telephonoscope, shortly after the invention of the telephone. At the time, it was imagined by early science fiction authors, that someday that light could be transmitted over copper wires, as sounds were. The idea of using scanning to transmit images was put to actual practical use in 1881 in the pantelegraph, through the use of a pendulum-based scanning mechanism. From this period forward, scanning in one form or another has been used in nearly every image transmission technology to date, including television. This is the concept of "rasterization", the process of converting a visual image into a stream of electrical pulses. In 1884 Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, a 23-year-old university student in Germany, patented the first electromechanical television system which employed a scanning disk, a spinning disk with a series of holes spiraling toward the center, for rasterization. The holes were spaced at equal angular intervals such that in a single rotation the disk would allow light to pass through each hole and onto a light-sensitive selenium sensor which produced the electrical pulses. As an image was focused on the rotating disk, each hole captured a horizontal "slice" of the whole image. [citation needed] Nipkow's design would not be practical until advances in amplifier tube technology became available. The device was only useful for transmitting still "halftone" imagesrepresented by equally spaced dots of varying sizeover telegraph or telephone lines.[citation needed] Later designs would use a rotating mirror-drum scanner to capture the image and a cathode ray tube (CRT) as a display device, but moving images were still not possible, due to the poor sensitivity of the selenium sensors. In 1907 Russian scientist Boris Rosing became the first inventor to use a CRT in the receiver of an experimental television system. He used mirror-drum scanning to transmit simple geometric shapes to the CRT.[3] Before the advent of DVD and Blu-ray, the Video CD (abbreviated as VCD, and also known as View CD, Compact Disc digital video) became the first format for distributing films on standard 120 mm optical discs. The format is a standard digital format for storing video on a Compact Disc. VCDs are playable in dedicated VCD players, most DVD-Video players, personal computers, and some video game consoles.

The VCD standard was created in 1993[1][2] by Sony, Philips, Matsushita, and JVC and is referred to as the White Book standard. Though supplanted by the two aforementioned formats, VCDs are still popular, particularly in the low cost market. In the early 1970s, Philips and MCA developed the Laserdisc. This optical medium is about one foot in diameter and holds an hour of analog video (along with audio in either analog or digital) on both sides. Though they provide superior picture quality through countless playbacks, Laserdiscs were always overshadowed by VHS because of their high price and lack of recording abilities. Near the 1980s, Philips created a small scale version of the Laserdisc. This disc is 4.8 inches in diameter and is single-sided. They called it Compact Disc or CD. The format was initially designed to store digitized sound and proved to be a success in the music industry. A few years later, Philips decided to give CDs the ability to produce video just like its 12-inch counterpart. This led to the creation of CD Video (CD-V) in 1987. But because of the disc's small size, plus the analog video which takes up too much disc space, only 5 minutes of picture information can fit in the CD (despite the fact that the audio was digital). Therefore CD-V distribution was limited to featuring music videos. Technical specifications [edit] Container In a VCD, the audio and video streams are multiplexed in an MPEG program stream (MPEG-PS) container. [edit] Video Video specifications[3] Codec: MPEG-1 Resolution: o NTSC: 352x240 o PAL/SECAM: 352x288 Aspect Ratio: o NTSC: 4:3 o PAL/SECAM: 4:3 Framerate: o NTSC: 29.97 or 23.976 frames per second o PAL/SECAM: 25 frames per second Bitrate: 1,150 kilobits per second o Rate Control: constant bitrate

Although many DVD video players support playback, VCD video is not compatible with the DVD-Video standard. [edit] Audio Audio specifications[4] Codec: MPEG-1 Audio Layer II Frequency: 44,100 hertz (44.1 kHz) Output: Dual channel or stereo Bitrate: 224 kilobits per second o Rate Control: Constant bitrate

As with most CD-based formats, VCD audio is incompatible with the DVD-Video standard due to a difference in frequency; DVDs require 48 kHz, whereas VCDs use 44.1 kHz. [edit] Advantages of compression An audio CD can hold 79 minutes of sound data, while a VCD can hold 74 minutes of picture and sound information. So how does a format that includes picture and sound holds nearly the same length of information as that of a sound-only format? The secret lies in the VCDs usage of a mpeg-1, a compression technique. For picture, frames that nearly have the same appearance are being limited. As for the audio, sounds that are above or below human hearing range are eliminated. [edit] Other information Video CDs are authored using the Mode 2/XA format, allowing roughly 800 megabytes of VCD data to be stored on one 80 minute CD (versus 700 megabytes when using Mode 1). This, combined with the net bitrate of VCD video and audio, means that almost exactly 80 minutes of VCD content can be stored on an 80 minute CD, 74 minutes of VCD content on a 74 minute CD, and so on. This was done in part to ensure compatibility with existing CD drive technology, specifically the earliest "1x" speed CD drives. The VCD standard also features the option of DVD-quality still images/slide shows with audio, at resolutions of 704x480 (NTSC) or 704x576 (PAL/SECAM). Version 2.0 also adds the playback control (PBC), featuring a simple menu like DVD-video. 352x240 (or SIF) resolution was chosen because it is half the vertical, and half the horizontal resolution of NTSC video. 352x288 is similarly one quarter PAL/SECAM resolution. This approximates the (overall) resolution of an analog VHS tape, which, although it has double the number of (vertical) scan lines, has a much lower horizontal resolution. A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVD originally stood for Digital Versatile Disk, or Digital Video Disk. The acronym was dropped after DVD proved to have more uses than just storing video content. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions. Pre-recorded DVDs are mass-produced using molding machines that physically stamp data onto the DVD. Such discs are known as DVD-ROM, because data can only be read and not written nor erased. Blank recordable DVDs (DVD-R and DVD+R) can be recorded once using optical disc recording technologies and supported by optical disc drives and DVD recorders and then function as a DVD-ROM. Rewritable DVDs (DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVDRAM) can be recorded and erased multiple times. DVDs are used in DVD-Video consumer digital video format and in DVD-Audio consumer digital audio format, as well as for authoring AVCHD discs. DVDs containing other types of information may be referred to as DVD data discs. Before the advent of DVD and Blu-ray, the Video CD (abbreviated as VCD, and also known as View CD, Compact Disc digital video) became the first format for distributing digitally encoded films on standard 120 mm optical discs. (its predecessor CD Video used analog video encoding). VCD was on the market in 1993. [4] In the same year, two new optical disc storage formats were being developed. One was the Multimedia Compact Disc (MMCD), backed by Philips and Sony, and the other was the Super Density (SD) disc, supported by Toshiba, Time Warner, Matsushita Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer, Thomson, and JVC. Representatives of the SD camp approached IBM, asking for advice on the file system to use for their disc as well as seeking support for their format for storing computer data. Alan E. Bell, a researcher from IBM's Almaden Research Center got that request and also learned of the MMCD development project. Wary of being caught in a repeat of the

costly videotape format war between VHS and Betamax in the 1980s, he convened a group of computer industry experts, including representatives from Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Dell, and many others. This group was referred to as the Technical Working Group, or TWG. Specifications DVD specifications created and updated by the DVD Forum are published as so-called DVD Books (e.g. DVDROM Book, DVD-Audio Book, DVD-Video Book, DVD-R Book, DVD-RW Book, DVD-RAM Book, DVD-AR Book, DVD-VR Book, etc.).[1][2][3] Some specifications for mechanical, physical and optical characteristics of DVD optical discs can be downloaded as freely available standards from the ISO website.[7] Also, the DVD+RW Alliance publishes competing DVD specifications such as DVD+R, DVD+R DL, DVD+RW or DVD+RW DL. These DVD formats are also ISO standards.[8][9][10][11] Some of DVD specifications (e.g. for DVD-Video) are not publicly available and can be obtained only from the DVD Format/Logo Licensing Corporation for a fee of US $5000. [12][13] Every subscriber must sign a non-

disclosure agreement as certain information in the DVD Book is proprietary and confidential.[12]