ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

576i

Okay, so imagine you are watching TV on an old television set, the ones with a really big back. Now, if you are watching something in 576i, it means that the picture on your TV screen is made up of 576 little lines that go up and down really fast.

But, because there are so many lines and your TV can't show them all at once, it splits the picture in half and shows the first 288 lines and then the second 288 lines. This happens over and over again really fast, so you see a moving picture on your TV screen.

Now, the "i" in 576i stands for "interlaced," which means that the lines are shown in that split way we talked about. There's also a "p" which stands for "progressive," where all the lines are shown at the same time, but that's a different story.

So, basically, 576i is a way of showing pictures on old TVs by splitting them into a bunch of lines that go up and down really fast.