DVD Demystified

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Table 9.1 cont.
Checklist of Player
Features
Chapter 9
Do I want a player that holds more Three- or five-disc players are useful
than one disc? for music. Players that hold 100 or
more discs allow you to make your
entire collection quickly available.
Am I bothered by bright front panel Check for an option to dim or turn off
displays when watching movies? the lighted display.
Do I want to zoom in to check details of Look for players with picture zoom.
the picture?
Do I care about black-level adjustment? Check for a 0/0.7 IRE setup option.
Do I value special deals? Some players come with free DVD
coupons and free DVD rentals.
How to Hook Up a DVD Player
The DVD format is designed around some of the latest advances in digital
audio and video, yet the players are also designed to work with TVs and
video systems of all varieties. Therefore, the back of a DVD player can have
a confusing diversity of connectors producing a potpourri of signals.
This section discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of
output signal, what the connectors are like, and how to hook them up to typical
audio/video equipment. Refer to “Video Interface” and “Audio Interface”
in Chapter 6 for technical details.
Signal Spaghetti
Most DVD players produce the following output signals:
■ Analog stereo audio. This standard two-channel audio signal can
include Dolby Surround encoding.
■ Digital audio. This raw digital signal can connect to an external digitalto-analog
converter or digital audio decoder. There are two different
signal interface formats for digital audio: S/PDIF and Toslink. Both
formats can carry pulse-code modulated (PCM) audio, multichannel
Dolby Digital (AC-3) encoded audio, multichannel DTS encoded audio,
and multichannel MPEG-2 encoded audio. The digital audio output on
DVD-Audio-capable players also can carry MLP encoded audio.