High Definition Television (HDTV)

High-definition television, or HDTV, has been gaining steam for quite a while now as more and more people are upgrading their home entertainment hardware.

Basically, HDTV is an improvement in the amount of definition, or pixels, that your television set can display at one time. The resolution, a term that defines the lines of color information displayed on your screen, is much higher on a HDTV-compatible television set than a set without HDTV. Newer HDTV television sets will handle from 720 to 1080 lines of color information on screen at once, while most North American televisions are only capable of 525! The difference is staggering.

Progressive Scan

The term "progressive scan" refers to the way your screen updates its color display. Standard televisions are used to the interlaced format, which refreshes in rotation of odd and even lines. This causes what we know as "flickering" on a television or computer monitor. Progressive scan, a feature found in all HDTV sets, scans the entire picture line by line every sixteenth of a second. There is virtually no "flicker" on these new sets.

At the time that this document was prepared, TiVo has yet to upgrade its hardware to include any compatibility to HDTV output. However, your HDTV will work fine with a TiVo receiver.