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Q What processes what in the video chain? Say you have an Oppo Blu-ray player hooked up to a good AVR that’s hooked up to an Epson 5030 projector. Does each do its own thing? Or do you need to turn some types of processing off while leaving others enabled? Also, what is the meaning of life? —Jeff Riddick / via e-mail

A It’s not necessary for all components in the video chain to perform video processing—deinterlacing, upscaling, noise reduction, etc. The best course of action is to use a test disc to determine which component provides the highest-quality processing and lean on that particular one to do the heavy lifting. For instance, say you’ve determined that your AVR does an awesome job handling video. You’d want to use it to deinterlace and upconvert video sources and pass them on at full 1080p or 4K resolution to the TV or projector, which would display them natively without additional processing. As for your question about the meaning of life: “The ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is... 42!”—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy