Dictionary

Some terms used in the area of Audio/Video and there meaning.

Aspect Ratio

The ratio of width to height of a video.

bitrate

The number of bits of data to be played per second.

Chroma

Greek for color, the part of a video file or signal that encodes the color portion.

codec

A part of the program which understands a type of video or audio. (Compression/Decompression)

Decode

To understand and play a file, VideoLAN needs to decode it. It does this with a decoder.

ES

An elementry stream, a single channel of audio, video or subtitles (without a container).

framerate

The number of frames of video displayed (or encoded to be displayed) per unit time, usually expressed in frames per second (fps) or Hertz (Hz). One Hertz is equivilant to one frame per second.

Overlay

Displaying an image on top of the video

Sample rate

Usually used with audio, the frequency at which a signal is digitally sampled, usually expressed in Hertz (Hz) or kiloHertz (kHz). One Hertz is equivilant to one sample per second, One kiloHertz is a thousand (1000) Hertz.

Transcode

Transcoding is changing the format of a file.