What Is Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation (EFM)?
Do you know how some things seem too good to be true? Like finding a wallet full of cash with your name on it or discovering that the girl you've been crushing on is into you? Well, Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation (EFM) is like that. It's a data-encoding technique for CDs and MiniDiscs that allows more data to be stored in less space, which means more music on one disc—or even more discs for one album! It also makes them highly resistant to dust, fingerprints and tiny scratches. Schouhamer Immink invented EFM in 1980, the data retrieval process would fail if the disc were scratched or dirty, and you'd get an error message instead of hearing your favorite song. Now, thanks to EFM, we can enjoy our favorite tunes no matter how often we drop our Discman on the floor or let our dog chew on it (which he does!). If you've ever been to a movie theater and dealt with the shame of paying more than $10 for a ticket, you know what we're talking about. It's not just that you paid too much; they spent too much on the popcorn. So why is it that movies have always cost so much? The answer: they've never been able to use all their storage space. A DVD has 4.7 gigabytes of storage space, and only about 3 GB is used for storing movies because error correction codes (ECCs) take up the rest of it. The ECCs are necessary to ensure that imperfections in the disc don't cause critical data to be forgotten by the optical pickup in the playback mechanism. Every DVD player has an error correction algorithm built into it, which means that even if imperfections or foreign material are on your disc, it can still be read accurately and without error. This isn't just good news for people who want their money's worth when they buy a movie: it's excellent news for everyone because, without ECCs, we wouldn't be able to store as much data as we do today!
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