Like all electronic products,The Definitive Portable DVD Player Glossary, Every Feature Explained Articles features for portable players are also full of jargon. As a reseller of portable DVD players it is important for you to understand these clearly for two reasons:

* Savvy consumers knows and understand electronics and are looking for an equally adept seller

* Novices need help understanding which product is right for them

Here is a list of terms which should help you go from zero knowledge to expert in no time:

** Disc Formats **
CD: Short for Compact Disc Read Only Memory (CD-ROM), is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer.

CD-R: A CD-R (recordable) allows for content to be written once and read many times. This type of disc stores all types of media files.

CD-RW: This is a rewritable medium that allows for content to be written many times and read many times. The CD-RW can also be used to store different formats of content.

VCD: Also known as Video Compact Disc is a format for storing video on CDs, and is not dissimilar to a VCR in that you cannot skip chapters or view rich data, just fast forward and rewind.

SVCD: This stands for Super Video Compact Disk. This is a successor to the VCD and was meant to challenge the DVD format. Quality and storage capacity is superior to a VCD, but lower than the DVD.

DVD: Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Discs. They look like CDs but store six times more data and can display video in chapters.

DVD RW/ DVD+RW/ DVD-RW: These three terms essentially mean the same thing. These are rewritable DVDs. They can be rewritten close to a thousand times, making them very useful as backup media. The + and – and competing standards, though it is generally accepted that + is superior and therefore the industry standard for rewritable disks.

** Media Formats **
MPEG 1, 2, 3 & 4: These are compression standards for audio and video set by the Moving Pictures Export Group. The numerals refer to versions with MPEG 1 being the 1st and MPEG 4 being the latest. These standards apply across all transmission and distribution platforms.

MP4: This is another name of the MPEG 4-Part 14 standard created by the Moving Pictures Expert Group standards. This standard specifies compression for both video and audio. Commercially a number of manufacturers use MP4 on products that can playback both audio and video. However, this is misleading as MP4 products must be able to playback files with the extension .mp4.

WMA: Windows Media Audio is an audio data compression standard developed by Microsoft.

DiVX: This is a compression technique that converts lengthy video sequences into smaller parts without loosing too much detail. It uses the MPEG-4 compression standard.

XVID: The opposite of DiVX, is a compression technique and a direct competitor for DiVX. It also does video compression based on the MPEG-4 standard. The difference between the two is DiVX is proprietary while XVID is distributed under Gnu or is free to use.

MP3: Designed by the Moving Pictures Expert Group, this is a standard for audio files compression.

JPEG: This is a compression standard for photographs ai video generator and is used by most digital cameras. Having this lets the user playback pictures from the camera on the portable DVD screen.

** External Ports **
AV In: Audio/Video input point to connect external devices like a video cam direct to the player

AV Out: Audio/Video output point for connecting DVD player to home TV, car system etc.

VGA Out: Video Graphics Array port, first introduced in computers now popular in portable devices, used to connect to LCD displays among others.

USB: Universal Serial Bus is one of the most common interface devices on a variety of platforms from computing to audio/video. With the USB you can hook up a whole host of devices to the DVD Player including mobile phones, laptops, computers, mp3 and MP4 players etc.

SD/MMC/MS Card Reader: Secure Digital/Multimedia Card and Memory Stick are all types of flash memory used in portable electronic devices from MP3/MP4 players, digital cameras, camcorders, mobile phones etc. A card reader for these devices ensures content on them can be played on the DVD player.