A plasma, LCD or DLP screen is composed of a fixed number of pixels. The number of pixels determines the resolution of the screen, and so the native resolution is the absolute highest resolution the screen is able to resolve. In order to display Blu-ray's full quality, you need a screen with a resolution of 1920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels in height.

One of the two video compression formats (codecs) used to store video on Blu-ray, the other being VC-1. Both provide stunning picture quality.

A video compression format (codec) created by the Moving Picture Experts Group, used in DVD, DVB (digital television) and cable TV.

The most common and popular form of audio compression codec, MP3 reduces the sound data on CDs to approximately one tenth of the original size with an acceptable reduction in quality.

Purely as a result of the nature of the technology, LCD TVs are sometimes afflicted with a visual quirk that results in perceived blurred motion. This is caused by each frame of the video being held on screen for the entire 24th of the second, which is quite unlike the effect created by a film shutter opening and closing in the cinema. Some televsions counter this by inserting a black frame between each frame of the video, and some flicker the backlight on and off. Other televisions use "Motion Smoothing", which creates fake transitional frames between the original frames.

Mini DisplayPort is a compact form of the DisplayPort media connector.

Macroblocking is a digital video artefact that's caused by lossy compression used in excess. You'll most commonly see it on digital TV broadcasts where the screen breaks up into a blocky mess during fast moving action scenes, but on DVDs it's also ruthlessly revealed by high definition TV sets.

LPCM is something you will occasionally see on Blu-ray discs' audio options, but it's basically what you've been listening to on CD for all these years. LPCM is linear audio, which is to say that there is no compression at all used to store it. The quality of the LPCM that you'll find on Blu-ray discs, however, is many, many orders of magnitude higher than the quality of that on audio CDs. In addition, some Blu-ray players are able to decode audio compression and convert it to LPCM, which will allow you to send a new format to a old receiver that is incapable of decoding the new Blu-ray compression formats.

To save space, most media use data compression to reduce the size of the file. Lossy compression describes compression formats (or "codecs") that sacrifice quality to minimise the amount of space used for storage. MP3, for instance is a lossy compression codec.

In order to save space, media files are subject to a technique called data compression that reduces their overall size. Some compression places a priority on saving space, and so sacrifices picture or sound quality: this is called "lossy" compression. Compression that loses none of the original's quality at all is called "lossless" compression. You won't find any consumer-oriented video using lossless compression yet, but as storage capacity improves, lossless audio and lossless images are starting to become more common. Blu-ray, for instance, now uses two lossless audio formats: Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio.