A modern replacement to the venerable VCR, the PVR or DVR records video on a hard disk drive instead of a videotape cassette. Benefits are much easier programmability, much better picture and sound quality and, best of all, no need to rewind.

Due to the technological constraints of the time, television was original stored and broadcast in an interlaced format. Interlaced video creates a picture by filling the screen with alternating scanning lines in fields that combined over time created full picture frames. Progressive scan video fills each field with the entire picture frame, thus offering a more stable, more natural, solid picture. By their nature, all LCD, DLP and plasma displays are inherently progressive scan, and so require a process call de-interlacing if the source is interlaced, but this is all done by the set and of little concern to the viewer.

In order to prevent interference from the wall socket causing unwanted noise in the sound and picture of your home theatre, it is possible to buy a device to clean up the current. There is a lot of dispute as to the effectiveness of this technology in the digital age, where things either work or don't, but if you are experiencing noisiness or interference despite your best efforts, it is advisable to discuss power-conditioning with an expert. Note: power conditioning is not the same thing as surge protection. Surge protection is an essential way of protecting your investment from harmful fluctuations in current.

If you're looking for an affordable, huge screen with astoundingly accurate colour and black levels, a plasma display is the way to go. While the quality of the image is unquestionably better than that of LCD, there are numerous disadvantages which have contributed to the diminishing popularity of the technology. The first, and most serious problem is a phenomenon called "burn-in", where extended use of the TV results in degraded picture quality as the glowing phosphors that produce the image wear out, often unevenly resulting in patchy degradation. The other drawback is that plasma TVs use a lot more power than LCD TVs, and so are less desirable to the more eco-conscious consumer.

When a movie is shot in an aspect ratio that is narrower than the screen on which it's being watched, in order to display the whole image without distortion it is shown between two black vertical bars or "pillarboxed". This is the same principle as "letterboxing" but reversed, and is not a malfunction.

The picture of your TV is composed of tiny dots of colour called "pixels". Every pixel consists of a red, green and blue sub-pixels that, together, are able to combine to create the full visible spectrum of colour. The more pixels in an image, the greater the resolution of the image and the more detail it is able to display.

The standard definition colour TV format used by most of the Western world (except for North America) for colour broadcasting since the 1950s. It has a resolution of 576 interlaced lines at a refresh rate of 50Hz, and DVDs purchased in Australia are in the PAL format.

Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode. A new technology that uses glowing plastic to create a picture. It offers substantial power savings over current technology by not requiring a backlight, and quite literally the best picture quality to date. The drawback is that, currently, the screens have a limited lifespan. So far, aside from a few extremely expensive (and tiny) screens manufactured by Sony, OLEDs are predominantly found on portable devices.

An open source audio compression codec. Similar to MP3, but not as widely supported by hardware.

The American standard format for colour television broadcast. Slightly inferior to the more widely-used PAL standard (used here in Australia), featuring only 480 lines of vertical resolution to PAL's 576. And, due to its 60Hz refresh rate, susceptible to an unfortunate effect called "judder" when trying to display media originally recorded on film.