Information technology: Movies in bits?

摘要

It was bound to happen. It may not be too long before we can watch a movie in bits that people have begun calling "Digital Cinema" (DCinema). Actually a form of DCinema is already happening. There are a few movie theatres around the world that do not use film reels and mechanical projectors, but use bits stored in hard disks, are converted to audio and visual signals using MPEG-2 decoders and projected on large screens using a variety of technologies. What is displayed in those theatres, however, is nothing different from what some people in Australia, Japan and USA already see in their homes: High Definition Television. The difference is that these theatres employ digital projectors with 1,2 million pixels (Mpixels) to generate the visual information that is then displayed on a large screen.