support HD Video and multi-channel sound. Blu-Ray players can usually support the reading of all formats and the writing to most so you only need the one player in your device.
Audio and Video encoding standards: The first digital standard most of us were exposed to was CD (CDDA – Compact Disc Audio Standard), which surprisingly still today is a very good lossless standard by which audio quality is measured. It’s called lossless as unlike digital sound encoding standards such as Dolby Digital or MP3 it does not compress or alter the content of the sound in anyway, it is recorded and then replayed exactly. Compression was originally required because storing multi-channel soundtracks required more storage space than was available on older media like the CD or legacy PC’s. CDDA took an analogue music track recorded on multi-track tape in a studio and converted it to digital by sampling it at 44.1KHz and storing it as a 16-bit binary number, and called it a digital Audio CD.
Then things got complicated with multi-channel home theatre sound and video that required much more space and much higher data rates. The only way to fit sound and video into the small capacity media and low data rate interfaces was to compress it and lose data thought not important. Research into what could be safely compressed and discarded while maintain reasonable quality resulted in the MP3 and MPEG digital compression standards. Bear in mind that your average MP3 audio recording is typically 128kbit/s whereas the trusty old 1980’s veteran CD supports 1,411.2kbit/s. That means the venerable CD has over ten times higher a bit density and hence a lot better quality. Many younger people who have only ever had the