The old cable box decrypts its set of data and discards the Passage bits, while a Passage-enabled box decrypts only the Passage-encoded video.

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First, the video frame is transformed and encoded on to a data beam.

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Video and audio clips are now encoded in the new embedded player, though some clips and archived content will continue to be available in the pop-up player format.

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The two slivers of encoded bits are rejoined to the bigger, unscrambled video stream before it hits the home.

FORBES: Sony busts up the powerful cable-box duopoly.

TakeTV has its limitations--it can only hold a few gigabytes of video, and can't display Web videos or those encoded in Windows or Mac formats.

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As for the video player we had to stick to MP4 format and nothing larger than the screen's resolution -- the standard iPod video settings worked like a charm (we had 900kbps and 30fps encoded by Xvid).

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Some have even gone as far as to state that Sony's strategy of using MPEG-2 and uncompressed PCM audio on single-layer Blu-ray discs may have required too much video compression, resulting in early releases that don't match the sharpness of VC-1 encoded movies available on HD DVD.

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