Abstract: A soft windowing technique involves the use of a window for vector assisted frame differing, the window being larger than a macroblock of the structure defined over the video picture. The edges of each window taper so that overlapping windows provide the correct pixel weighting at the edges. For a scheme having 16*16 luminance macroblocks and 8*8 chrominance macroblocks, the luminance window is 24*24 and the chrominance window is 12*12.

Abstract: A disk-shaped recording medium has a control record region in each recording region of successive recording tracks and which is divided into a first preformat region, a second preformat region and a focusing servo region arranged in succession in the direction along the respective track and respectively providing traverse data, tracking and clock data, and focusing servo data. An apparatus for reproducing data recorded in the tracks of such disk-shaped recording medium samples a playback output from an optical head scanning a track to detect focusing data from the focusing servo region and tracking data from the second preformat region and, in response thereto, applies focusing servo or tracking servo to the optical head. Further, traverse data is detected in the first preformat region to effect traverse counting of the recording tracks.