A motherboard is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory, and provides connectors for other peripherals. Unlike a backplane, a motherboard usually contains significant sub-systems, such as the central processor, the chipset's input/output and memory controllers, interface connectors, and other components integrated for general use.
In computing, an expansion card is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot on a computer's motherboard to add functionality to a computer system. Sometimes the design of the computer's case and motherboard involves placing most of these slots onto a separate, removable card. Typically such cards are referred to as a riser card in part because they project upward from the board and allow expansion cards to be placed above and parallel to the motherboard.
A graphics card is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a display device such as a monitor. Graphics cards are sometimes called discrete or dedicated graphics cards to emphasize their distinction to integrated graphics processor on the motherboard or the CPU. A graphics processing unit (GPU) that performs the necessary computations is the main component in a graphics card, but the acronym "GPU" is sometimes also used to refer to the graphics card as a whole.
PCI Express, officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common motherboard interface for personal computers' graphics cards, sound cards, hard disk drive host adapters, SSDs, Wi-Fi and Ethernet hardware connections. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot-swap functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization.
A digital video recorder (DVR) is an electronic device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SSD or other local or networked mass storage device. The term includes set-top boxes with direct to disk recording, portable media players and TV gateways with recording capability, and digital camcorders. Personal computers are often connected to video capture devices and used as DVRs; in such cases the application software used to record video is an integral part of the DVR. Many DVRs are classified as consumer electronic devices; such devices may alternatively be referred to as personal video recorders (PVRs), particularly in Canada. Similar small devices with built-in displays and SSD support may be used for professional film or video production, as these recorders often do not have the limitations that built-in recorders in cameras have, offering wider codec support, the removal of recording time limitations and higher bitrates.
A home theater PC (HTPC) or media center computer is a convergent device that combines some or all the capabilities of a personal computer with a software application that focuses on video, photo, audio playback, and sometimes video recording functionality. Since the mid-2000s, other types of consumer electronics, including game consoles and dedicated media devices, have crossed over to manage video and music content. The term "media center" also refers to specialized application software designed to run on standard personal computers.
A tuner is a subsystem that receives radio frequency (RF) transmissions, such as FM broadcasting, and converts the selected carrier frequency and its associated bandwidth into a fixed frequency that is suitable for further processing, usually because a lower frequency is used on the output. Broadcast FM/AM transmissions usually feed this intermediate frequency (IF) directly into a demodulator that converts the radio signal into audio-frequency signals that can be fed into an amplifier to drive a loudspeaker.
Hauppauge Computer Works is a US manufacturer and marketer of electronic video hardware for personal computers. Although it is most widely known for its WinTV line of TV tuner cards for PCs, Hauppauge also produces personal video recorders, digital video editors, digital media players, hybrid video recorders and digital television products for both Windows and Mac. The company is named after the hamlet of Hauppauge, New York, in which it is based.
MediaPortal is an open-source media player and digital video recorder software project, often considered an alternative to Windows Media Center. It provides a 10-foot user interface for performing typical PVR/TiVo functionality, including playing, pausing, and recording live TV; playing DVDs, videos, and music; viewing pictures; and other functions. Plugins allow it to perform additional tasks, such as watching online video, listening to music from online services such as Last.fm, and launching other applications such as games. It interfaces with the hardware commonly found in HTPCs, such as TV tuners, infrared receivers, and LCD displays.
Dreambox is a series of Linux-powered DVB satellite, terrestrial and cable digital television receivers, produced by German multimedia vendor Dream Multimedia.
The boot ROM is a type of ROM that is used for booting a computer system. There are two types: a mask boot ROM that cannot be changed afterwards and a boot EEPROM, which can contain an UEFI implementation.
Mpact-2 is a 125 MHz vector-processing graphics, audio and video media processor, a second generation in the Mpact family of Chromatic Research media processors, which can be used only as a co-processor to the main Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a microcomputer.
Sound Blaster Audigy is a product line of sound cards from Creative Technology. The flagship model of the Audigy family used the EMU10K2 audio DSP, an improved version of the SB-Live's EMU10K1, while the value/SE editions were built with a less-expensive audio controller.
TiVo digital video recorders encompass a number of digital video recorder (DVR) models that TiVo Corporation designed. Features may vary, but a common feature is that all of the units listed here require TiVo service and use its operating system.
Video capture is the process of converting an analog video signal—such as that produced by a video camera, DVD player, or television tuner—to digital video and sending it to local storage or to external circuitry. The resulting digital data are referred to as a digital video stream, or more often, simply video stream. Depending on the application, a video stream may be recorded as computer files, or sent to a video display, or both.
Serial Digital Video Out (SDVO) is a proprietary Intel technology introduced with their 9xx-series of motherboard chipsets.
SanDisk has produced a number of flash memory-based digital audio and portable media players since 2005. The current range of products bear the SanDisk Clip name, a line of ultraportable digital audio players. SanDisk players were formerly marketed under the Sansa name until 2014.
GB-PVR was a PVR application, running on Microsoft Windows, whose main function was scheduling TV recordings and playing back live TV. GB-PVR is no longer under active development and has been superseded by NextPVR, also known as nPVR.
Addressability is the ability of a digital device to individually respond to a message sent to many similar devices. Examples include pagers, mobile phones and set-top boxes for pay TV. Computer networks are also addressable via the MAC address on Ethernet network cards, and similar networking protocols like Bluetooth. This allows data to be sent in cases where it is impractical to control exactly where or to which devices the message is physically sent.
Proxmark3 is a multi-purpose hardware tool for radio-frequency identification (RFID) security analysis, research and development. It supports both high frequency and low frequency proximity cards and allows users to read, emulate, fuzz, and brute force the majority of RFID protocols.
