CS4984 Quiz for Unit 2 Version A

Instructions

You should take this quiz now, and send in your answers to the instructor (4984i@fox.cs.vt.edu) by email as soon as you are done. That should take less than an hour and so you are required to not spend more time than 90 minutes. You can refer to your notes and the readings (textbook, articles) and Internet items that are part of or referenced by the courseware. Be sure to have "4984" and the quiz ID (e.g., 1A, 2B) in the "Subject:" part of your message.

The Honor Code is in effect. All work on this quiz should be your own. Be sure to put your name and student ID at the top of your set of answers. Do NOT send a copy of your answers to anyone else, or look at anyone else's answers, anytime during this course.

Questions

  1. Briefly explain three characteristics of human hearing (i.e., psychoacoustics) that allow some aspects of sounds to be ignored during the process of capture and digitzation. Hint: Be sure to explain about both human perception and electronic / computer processing issues.
  2. Some regions (e.g., North America, Europe) have different TV standards. What are the three most common ones? What are the major differences and what effect do those differences have on perceived quality? What will be the effect on perceived quality of switching to HDTV?
  3. Consider the file system and operating system of either a 486-type system running DOS or a DECstation running UNIX. Briefly explain three situations in which these are not conducive to supporting a video-on-demand service, giving for each situation specific details of the problems and their causes.
  4. Explain how each of the following can help support access to multimedia information: a disk array (RAID), buffering, and scheduling of disk accesses. Explain how they can lead to higher performance multimedia servers.
  5. What is QuickTime? What are the main benefits of using it? How does it help with the organization of and access to multimedia information?