Are you looking to buy an after-market car DVD player and wondering what type of car DVD to get? Here is a quick guide ATSC which countries you can it in and what to look for.
Today's car DVD players are a big step up from the players of just a couple of years ago. They can do things,
in other words, that the basic DVD players of just several years ago couldn't come close to doing.
In North America, these players make use of a digital video signal different from signals broadcast in other parts of the world, making answering the question "Car DVD player mysteries: What is ATSC?" somewhat important.
ATSC is the abbreviation of "Advanced Television Systems Committee." In short, it is the standard for digital broadcasts that replaced the old NTSC standards for analog television and video broadcasts.
In June of 2009, the United States became the first country in North America to stop broadcasting analog signals and shift to completely to the digital ATSC signals. Canada will follow suit in 2011 and Mexico by 2021.
Basically, most devices equipped to receive and then display digital television signals – especially mobile devices like car DVD players – will feature the ATSC method and industry standard for doing so.
Analog television signals have almost completely disappeared these days in North America, though Mexico will lag behind for another decade, and ATSC as the standard was agreed upon not too long ago, though it was first developed in the early 1990s.
The ancestor to ATSC is actually the HDTV ("high definition television") standard that many of us have grown used to over the last decade.
It is a big improvement over HDTV standards, as a matter of fact, in the way it can produce wide screen images and even surround sound using certain Dolby Digital sound improvement technologies. In effect, it is being used to sharpen picture and sound in even small screen devices such as car DVD players.
The way that it can do this in something like a car DVD player's display screen is because there are a number of "subchannels" that can be supported by the device that makes use of ATSC technology tuners. Additionally, these new standards can also be thought of as the ways in which the common MPEG video streaming format is controlled by a device with ATSC.
In effect, ATSC controls the digital video broadcast stream by "modulating" the digital signal so that a great deal of information can be sent along at once and then decoded quickly at the other end (the car DVD player, for example).
Around the world, there are several other standards for digital video broadcast of television signals. The most common and widespread is DVB-T, which is found widely in Europe and the British Commonwealth in addition to several Asian and South American countries, so keep that in mind before buying a player.
It is easy enough to figure out if the device that is going to be purchased has ATSC as its primary decoding system by looking at the box or going to the ATSC website and looking at the map of where in the world ATSC is the standard.
For North America, especially the United States and Canada, more and more of these devices are being produced, so it is a sure bet that any new device will feature this broadcast decoding tuner. So then; for those considering going for one of these players, knowing a bit about how they decode signals can come in handy, it seems.
