Glossary - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 732

Topic Description

LAN Local Area Network. Usually Ethernet running at 10 Megabits

or 100 Megabits. Sometimes 1000 Mbits are deployed and
referred to as Gigabit Ethernet.

LCD Liquid Crystal Display. A special form of crystal that changes

the amount of light propagated through it when an electrical
charge is placed on either side of it. Polarizing filters are used to
display a light or dark segment of a display. Originally used in
calculators, it can now be used in TV displays.

LED Light-Emitting Diode. A self-illuminating display used to make

flat-screen TV sets.

LNB Low Noise Block in a satellite receiving dish.

M4IF MPEG 4 Industry Forum. See MPEGIF.

Mac address The genuinely unique network hardware address for your

Ethernet interface. This is supposed to be guaranteed to be
unique worldwide but some manufacturers of Ethernet interface
cards have used the same number multiple times. Be careful of
this when adding networking capability to machines on the
same sub-network with multiple cards from one manufacturer.

Macroblock Video pictures are degenerated to blocks of 16 × 16 or 8 × 8

pixels so that similarities can be found.

Macromedia Flash Useful for embedding into multimedia presentations but has

some limitations due to its proprietary nature. It is ubiquitous.

Mbps Megabits per second. Digital video transmitted via satellite

using MPEG-2 compression typically uses 3.5 to 4.5 Mb/s to
carry the content stream.

Media center A centralized system that contains media for sharing among

several or more client systems.

Mesh (1) A set of connected polygons that describe a surface onto which a

texture can be mapped. Used in MPEG-4 as part of the
structured video coding and display mechanism.

Mesh (2) A networking strategy where broadband connections through a

community can be organized using a mesh of connected nodes.
Sometimes called a community mesh or peer-to-peer network.

Microcosm The Digital Anarchy Microcosm codec is a 64-bit lossless

implementation. It delivers excellent quality but has limited
availability. Digital Anarchy has a variety of alternative codecs
available.