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DVD

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Dual layer
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DVD9 be merged
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DVD-R writing/reading side

DVD-R with purple dye, 4.7 GB

DVD (sometimes known as "Digital Versatile Disc" or "Digital
Video Disc") is an optical disc storage media format
that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound
quality. DVDs resemble compact discs as their
physical dimensions are the same (12 cm or occasionally 8 cm in diameter) but
they are encoded in a different format and at a much higher density. The
official DVD specification is maintained by the DVD Forum.

Contents

1 History

2 Technical
information

3 DVD-Video

3.1 Restrictions

3.1.1 Content-scrambling
system

4 Region codes

4.1 User
operations

5 DVD-Audio

5.1 Security

6 Players and
recorders

7 Competitors and
successors

8 Direct-to-DVD

9 See also

10 References

11 External links

11.1 Official

11.2 Technology

11.3 DVD
collection

11.4 Other

[edit]

History

In the early 1990s two high density optical
storage standards were being developed: one was the MultiMedia Compact Disc
(MMCD), backed by Philips and Sony, and the other was the Super
Density Disc (SD), supported by Toshiba, Time-Warner, Matsushita Electric,
Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric,
Pioneer, Thomson,
and JVC. IBM's president, Lou
Gerstner, acting as a matchmaker, led an effort to unite the two camps
behind a single standard, anticipating a repeat of the costly format war between
VHS and Betamax in the 1980s.

Philips and Sony abandoned their MMCD format and agreed upon Toshiba's SD
format with two modifications that are both related to the servo tracking
technology. The first one was the adoption of a pit geometry that allows
"push-pull" tracking, a proprietary Philips/Sony technology. The second
modification was the adoption of Philips' EFMPlus.
EFMPlus, created by Kees Immink,
who also designed EFM, is 6%
less efficient than Toshiba's SD code, which resulted in a capacity of 4.7GB
instead of SD's original 5GB. The great advantage of EFMPlus is its great
resilience against disc damage such as scratches and fingerprints. The result
was the DVD specification Version 1.0, announced in 1995 and finalized in September 1996. In May 1997, the
DVD Consortium was replaced by the DVD Forum , which is open to all
companies.

The first DVD players and discs were available in November 1996 in Japan, March 1997 in the United
States, 1998 in
Europe and in 1999 in Australia. The
first pressed DVD was the movie Twister in 1996. The
movie had the first test for 2.1 surround sound. The first titles released in
the U.S., on March 19, 1997, by Lumivision, authored by AIX Entertainment, were
IMAX adaptations:
Africa: The Serengeti, Antarctica: An Adventure of a Different
Nature, Tropical Rainforest, and Animation Greats.

By the spring of 1999 the price of a DVD player had dropped below $300 US. At
that point Wal-Mart began to offer DVD
players for sale, but DVDs represented only a small part of their video
inventory; VHS tapes of movies made up the remainder.

As of 2006 the situation is reversed; DVDs make up the bulk and VHS is a slim
minority. The price of a DVD player has dropped to below the level of a typical
VCR (although DVD
recorders are still significantly more expensive than VCRs); a low-end player
with reasonable quality can be purchased for under $35 US in many retail stores
and many modern computers are sold with DVD-ROM drives. Most, but not
all, movie "sets" or series have been released in box sets, as have some entire
seasons or selected episode volumes of older and newer television
programs.

DVD rentals first topped those of VHS during the week of June 15, 2003 (27.7 M rentals DVD vs. 27.3 M
rentals VHS). Major U.S. retailers Circuit City and Best Buy
stopped selling VHS tapes in 2002 and 2003, respectively. In June 2005, Wal-Mart
and several other retailers announced plans to phase out the VHS format
entirely, in favor of the more popular DVD format. However, blank VHS tapes are
still widely available since DVD video recorders are significantly less common
than DVD players.

According to the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG), all DVD sales and rentals
(films, television series, special interests, etc) totaled $21.2 billion in
2004. The sales portion of that was $15.5 billion. In comparison, the total 2004
US box office for theatrical rentals was $9.53 billion (per the National
Association of Theater Owners or NATO). While the growth of theatrical films on
DVD has cooled recently, that of television programs and music video has
increased dramatically.

In 2000, Sony released its PlayStation 2 console in
Japan. In addition to playing video games
developed for the system it was also able to play DVD movies. This proved to be
a huge selling point because the PS2 cost about the same as standard DVD players
but could do much more. As a result, many electronic stores that normally did
not carry video game consoles carried PS2s. In keeping with this tradition, Sony
has announced that it will implement one of DVD's possible successors, Blu-ray, into its next
PlayStation console currently known as the PlayStation 3.

Microsoft's Xbox, released a year after the
PlayStation 2, also had the capability to play DVD discs with an add-on remote
control kit, cementing the DVD's place in video game consoles.
Nintendo's GameCube ordinarily
cannot play DVDs but uses a modified DVD for its game media. However, one
GameCube model known as the Panasonic Q (sold only in Japan) allowed for DVD
playback in the GameCube. Later, when the Xboxs follow-up, the Xbox 360 was
released, it played dvd's without the addon.

"DVD" was originally an initialism for
"Digital Video Disc." Some members of the DVD Forum believe that it
should stand for "Digital Versatile Disc" to reflect its widespread use
for non-video applications. Toshiba, which maintains the official DVD Forum site
[1], adheres to the
latter interpretation, and indeed this appeared within the copyright warnings on
some of the earliest examples. However, the DVD Forum never reached a consensus
on the matter, and so today the official name of the format is simply "DVD"; the
letters do not officially stand for anything.[2]

[edit]

Technical information

DVDs are made from a 0.6 mm thick disc of polycarbonate plastic
coated with a much thinner reflective layer of aluminium or gold. Two such discs are glued
together to form a 1.2 mm disc that can be designed to be read from one side
(single sided) or both sides (double sided). The substrates are half as thick as
a CD to make it possible to use a lens with a higher numerical aperture
and therefore use smaller pits and narrower tracks. Discs commonly come in 8cm
or 12cm diameters.

A single-layer DVD can store 4.7 GB (4.38 GiB), which is around seven
times as much as a standard CD-ROM. By employing a red laser at 650 nm
wavelength (compared to 780 nm for CD) and a numerical aperture of
0.6 (compared to 0.45 for CD), the read-out resolution is increased by a factor
1.65. This holds for two dimensions, so that the actual physical data density
increases by a factor of 3.5. DVD uses a more efficient coding method in the
physical layer. CD's error correction, CIRC, is replaced by a powerful Reed-Solomon product code,
RS-PC; Eight-to-Fourteen
Modulation (EFM) is replaced by a more efficient version, EFMPlus, which uses
eight-to-sixteen modulation. There is no subcode as in CD. As a result, the DVD
format is 47 percent more efficient with respect to CD-ROM, which uses a "third"
error correction layer.

There are a variety of application types for DVD:

DVD-Video (containing
movies (video and sound))

DVD-Audio (containing
high-definition sound)

SACD
(containing high-definition sound)

DVD-VR (containing recorded video and sound, usually from TV or camcorder)

DVD+VR (a variation of DVD-Video used for recording on +R and +RW discs)

PS2 DVD (containing games for PlayStation 2)

Xbox DVD (containing games for Xbox)

GameCube Mini-DVD (containing games for Nintendo GameCube)

DVD-Data (containing data)

The disc medium can be:

DVD-ROM: read only, manufactured by a press

DVD-R:
recordable once

DVD-RW:
rewritable

DVD-RAM:
random access rewritable

DVD+R:
recordable once

DVD+RW:
rewritable

DVD-R
DL: dual layer record once

DVD+R
DL: dual layer record once

DVD-RW
DL: dual layer rewritable

DVD+RW
DL: dual layer rewritable

Two DVDs with different bottom sides.

The disc may have one or two sides, and one or two layers of data per side;
the number of sides and layers determines the disc capacity.

DVD-5: single sided, single layer, 4.7 gigabytes (GB), or 4.38 gibibytes (GiB)

DVD-9: single sided, double layer, 8.5 GB (7.92 GiB)

DVD-10: double sided, single layer on both sides, 9.4 GB (8.75 GiB)

DVD-14: double sided, double layer on one side, single layer on other,
13.3 GB (12.3 GiB)

DVD-18: double sided, double layer on both sides, 17.1 GB (15.9 GiB)

There are also 8 cm DVDs (not mini-DVD, which usually refers
to DVD-Video data on a CD) with a disc capacity of 1.5 GB.

The capacity of a DVD-ROM can be visually determined by noting the number of
data sides, and looking at the data side, or sides, of the disc. Double-layered
sides are usually gold-colored, while single-layered sides are usually
silver-colored, like a CD. Another way to identify how many layers a DVD
contains is to look at the center ring on the data side(s) of the disc. If there
are two barcodes, there are two layers on that side. If there is one barcode,
there is only one layer.

Each medium can contain any of the above content and can be any layer
type.

The DVD
Forum created the official DVD-ROM/R/RW/RAM standards and the DVD+RW Alliance created
the DVD+R/RW standards. Since DVD+R/RW discs are not technically DVDs as per the
DVD Forum standards, they are not allowed to display the DVD logo. Instead, they
display an "RW" logo, even if it is not rewritable, which some consider to be
deceptive advertising. However, they are readable by most DVD drives, so they
are commonly referred to as DVD+R and DVD+RW.

The "+" (plus) and "-" (dash) are similar technical standards and are
partially compatible. As of 2005, both formats are equally popular, with about
half of the industry supporting "+", and the other half "-". Around 90% of DVD
readers (drives and player) can read the recordable formats, with DVD-R having
the best overall compatibility in independent tests. Almost all DVD writers can
write both formats and carry both the +RW and DVD-R/RW logos.

Unlike compact discs, where sound (CDDA, Red Book)
is stored in a fundamentally different fashion than data (Yellow
book et al.), a properly authored DVD will always contain data in files
readable by both the UDF filesystem and
the ISO 9660 filesystem (often called UDF Bridge format).

DVD pick-up head and drive.

The reference data rate of DVD is 11.08 Mbps (million bits per second). The
data transfer rate of a DVD drive is often given in multiples of 1352 KB/s,
which means that a drive with 16x speed designation allows a data transfer rate
of 16 × 1352 = 21640 KB/s (21.13 MB/s). As CD drive speeds are given in
multiples of 150 KB/s, one DVD "speed" equals nine CD "speeds," so an 8x DVD
drive should have a data transfer rate similar to that of a 72x CD drive. In
physical rotation terms (spins per second), one DVD "speed" equals three CD
"speeds," so an 8x DVD drive has the same rotational speed as 24x CD drive.

Early CD and DVD drives read data at a constant rate. The data on the disc is
passed under the read head at a constant rate (Constant Linear Velocity, or
CLV). As linear (meters per second) track speed grows at outer parts of the disc
proportionally to the radius, the rotational speed of the disc was adjusted
according to which portion of the disc was being read. Most current CD and DVD
drives have a constant rotation speed (Constant Angular Velocity, or CAV). The
maximum data rate specified for the drive/disc is achieved only at the end of
the disc's track. (The track starts at the inner circle of the disc and spirals
outward.) The average speed of the drive therefore equals only about 50–70% of
the maximum nominal speed. While this seems a disadvantage, such drives have a
lower seek
time as they do not have to change the disc's speed of rotation.

[edit]

DVD-Video

Example of how producer could show the consumer full
compatibility with DVD-Video specification.

Typical DVD-Video file structure.

DVD-Video discs require a DVD-drive with an MPEG-2 decoder (e.g. a DVD-player
or a DVD computer drive with a software DVD player). Commercial DVD movies are
encoded using a combination of MPEG-2 compressed video and audio of varying
formats (often multi-channel formats as described below). Typical data rates for
DVD movies range from 3–10 Mbit/s, and the bit rate is
usually adaptive. The video resolution on NTSC discs is 720 × 480 and on PAL
discs is 720 × 576. A high number of audio tracks and/or lots of extra material
on the disc will often result in a lower bit rate (and image quality) for the
main feature.

The audio data on a DVD movie can be of the format PCM, DTS, MP2,
or Dolby Digital (AC-3). In
countries using the NTSC standard any movie should
contain a sound track in (at least) either PCM or Dolby AC-3 formats, and any
NTSC player must support these two; all the others are optional. This ensures
any standard compatible disc can be played on any standard compatible player.
The vast majority of commercial NTSC releases today employ AC-3 audio.

Initially, in countries using the PAL standard (e.g. most of Europe)
the sound of DVD was supposed to be standardized on PCM and MP2, but apparently
against the wishes of Philips, under public pressure
on December
5, 1997, the DVD Forum
accepted the addition of Dolby AC-3 to the optional formats on discs and
mandatory formats in players. The vast majority of commercial PAL releases
employ AC-3 audio by now.

DVDs can contain more than one channel of audio to go together with the video
content. In many cases, sound tracks in more than one language track are present
(for example, a dubbed track in the language of the country where the disc is
sold in addition to one in the film's original language).

With several channels of audio from the DVD, the cabling needed to carry the
signal to an amplifier or TV can occasionally be somewhat frustrating. Most
systems include an optional digital connector for this task, which is then
paired with a similar input on the amplifier. The selected audio signal is sent
over the connection, typically over RCA connectors or TOSLINK, in its
original format to be decoded by the audio equipment. When playing compact
discs, the signal is sent in S/PDIF format instead.

Video is another issue which continues to present problems. Current players
typically output analog video only, both composite video on an
RCA jack, as well as S-Video in the standard
connector. However neither of these connectors were intended to be used for progressive video, so
yet another set of connectors has started to appear, to carry a form of component video, which
keeps the three components of the video, one luminance signal and two color
difference signal, as stored on the DVD itself, on fully separate wires (whereas
S-Video uses two wires, uniting and degrading the two color signals, and
composite only one, uniting and degrading all three signals). The connectors are
further confused by using a number of different physical connectors on different
player models, RCA or BNC, as well as using VGA
cables in a non-standard way (VGA is normally analog RGB—a different,
incompatible form of component video). Even worse, there are often two sets of
component outputs, one carrying interlaced video, and
the other progressive. In Europe (but not most other PAL areas), SCART connectors are typically
used, which can carry composite, Y/C (S-Video), and/or analog RGB
interlaced video signals, as well as analog two-channel sound on a single
convenient multiwire cable. The analog RGB component signal offers video quality
which is superior to S-Video and identical to
progressive YPbPr component video (in fact the YPbPr signal has to be converted
to RGB component video somewhere in the chain to drive the display - it doesn't
matter where this conversion is performed). Some DVD players and set-top boxes
offer YPbPr
component video signals over the wires in the SCART connector intended for RGB,
though this violates the official specification. HDMI is a new digital connection
similar to DVI; it
carries High Definition, Enhanced Definition and Standard Definition video.
Along with video HDMI also supports up to eight-channel digital audio. Some
HDMI-equipped DVD players can upconvert the video to
higher definition formats such as 720p and, more rarely, 1080p.

DVD Video may also include one or more subtitle tracks in various
languages, including those made especially for the deaf and hearing impaired. They
are stored as bitmap images with transparent
background which are overlaid over the video during playback. The subtitle track
is contained within the VOB file of the DVD. Subtitles are
restricted to four colors (including transparency) and thus tend to look cruder
than permanent subtitles on film.

DVD Video may contain Chapters for easy navigation (and continuation of a
partially watched film). If space permits, it is also possible to include
several versions (called "angles") of certain scenes, though today this feature
is mostly used—if at all—not to show different angles of the action, but as part
of internationalization to e.g. show different language versions of images
containing written text, if subtitles will not do (for instance, credits).
Multiple angles have found a niche in pornography though.

A major selling point of DVD Video is that its storage capacity allows for a
wide variety of extra features in addition to the feature film itself. This can
include audio commentary
that is timed to the film sequence, documentary features,
unused footage, trivia text commentary, simple games and film shorts.

[edit]

Restrictions

DVD-Video has four complementary systems designed to restrict the DVD user in
various ways: Macrovision, Content Scrambling
System (CSS), region codes, and
disabled user operations (UOPs).

[edit]

Content-scrambling system

Many DVD-Video titles use content-scrambling
system (CSS) encryption, which is intended to discourage people from
bypassing the region control mechanism (see below). Usually, users need to
install software provided on the DVD or downloaded from the Internet such as WinDVD, PowerDVD, MPlayer, or VLC to be able to view
the disc in a computer system.

The CSS has caused major problems for the inclusion of DVD players in any open
source operating systems, since open source player implementations are not
officially given access to the decryption keys or license the patents involved in the CSS. Proprietary
software players were also difficult to find on some platforms. However, a
successful effort has been made to write a decoder by reverse engineering,
resulting in DeCSS.
This has led to long-running legal battles and the arrest of some of those
involved in creating or distributing the DeCSS code, through the use of the
controversial U.S. Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, on the grounds that such software could also be
used to facilitate unauthorized copying of the data on the discs. These laws
currently affect only the United States; most other
countries can use de-scrambling software to bypass the DVD restrictions. A number of
software programs have since appeared on the Web to view DVDs on a number of
different platforms.

The restrictions also prevent people from copying DVDs. In the past few years
a large amount of software has been created to make copies such as DVD
Shrink, DVD Decrypter, and ShrinkTo5.

[edit]

Region codes

Each DVD-Video disc contains one or more region codes (sometimes called
zones), denoting the area(s) of the world in which distribution and playback are
intended. The commercial DVD-Video player specification dictates that a player
must only play discs that contain its region code. In theory, this allows the
motion picture studios to control the various aspects of a release (including
content, date and price) on a region-by-region basis. In practice, many DVD
players allow playback of any disc, or can be modified to do so. Entirely
independent of encryption, region coding pertains to regional lockout, which
originated in the video game
industry.

Typically, a DVD-Video disc's outer packaging bears a symbol
indicating its region code.

Region code

Area

0

Informal term meaning "playable in all regions"

1

Bermuda, Canada, United States and U.S.
territories

2

Most of Western Europe, the
Middle East, Egypt, Greenland, Japan, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland

3

Southeast Asia, Hong
Kong, Macau, South
Korea, Taiwan

4

Central America,
Oceania,
South America, Mexico, Australia

5

The rest of Africa, Eastern Europe, South
Asia, Mongolia, North
Korea, Russia

6

Mainland
China

7

Reserved for future use

8

International venues such as aircraft, cruise
ships, etc.

See a world map
showing region codes

European Region 2 DVDs may be sub-coded "D1" through "D4." "D1" identifies a
UK-only release. "D2" and
"D3" identify European DVDs that are not sold in the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
"D4" identifies DVDs that are distributed throughout Europe.

Any combination of regions can be applied to a single disc. For example, a
DVD designated Region 2/4 is suitable for playback in Western Europe, Oceania
and any other Region 2 or Region 4 area. Often labeled "all" or "all regions," a
so-called "Region 0" disc (actually coded Region 1/2/3/4/5/6) is meant to be
playable worldwide.

The term "Region 0" also describes DVD players that were designed or modified
to incorporate Regions 1–6 simultaneously, thereby providing compatibility with
virtually any disc, irrespective of region[s]. This apparent solution was
popular in the early days of the DVD format, but studios quickly responded by
adjusting discs to refuse to play in such machines. This system is known as
"Regional Coding Enhancement" or RCE.

Nowadays, many "multi-region" DVD players defeat regional lockout and RCE by
automatically identifying and matching a disc's region code and/or allowing the
user to manually select a particular region. Others simply bypass the region
code check entirely. Some manufacturers of DVD players now freely supply
information on how to disable regional lockout, and on some recent models, it
appears to be disabled by default. Dozens of Web sites provide information on
how to disable region checking in many players.

Many view region code enforcement as a violation of WTO free trade agreements or competition law. The Australian
Competition and Consumer Commission has warned that DVD-Video players that
enforce region coding may violate the Trade Practices Act
[3];
the government of New Zealand has ruled similarly [4].

[edit]

User operations

DVD-Video allows the disc to specify whether or not the user may perform any
operation, such as selecting a menu, skipping chapters, forwarding or
rewinding—essentially any function on the remote control. This is known as User
Operation Prohibitions, or UOPs for short. Most DVD players respect these
commands (e.g. by preventing fast-forwarding through a copyright message at the
beginning of a disc), although some can be configured to ignore them,
particularly open source player software. Many grey market players ignore
UOPs.

[edit]

DVD-Audio

Main article: DVD-Audio

DVD-Audio is a format for delivering high-fidelity audio content on a
DVD. It offers many channels (from mono to 5.1 surround sound) at
various sampling frequencies and sample rates. Compared to the CD format, the
much higher capacity DVD format enables the inclusion of either considerably
more music (with respect to total running time and quantity of songs) or far
higher audio quality (reflected by higher linear sampling rates and higher
vertical bit-rates,
and/or additional channels for spatial
sound reproduction).

Despite DVD-Audio's superior technical specifications, there is debate as to
whether or not the resulting audio enhancements are distinguishable to typical
human ears. DVD-Audio currently forms a niche market, probably due to its
dependency upon new and relatively expensive equipment.

[edit]

Security

Main article: CPRM

DVD-Audio discs employ a robust copy prevention
mechanism, called Content
Protection for Prerecorded Media (CPRM / CPPM) supported by the DVD+RW
Alliance (IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba).

CPPM was cracked in 2005.

[edit]

Players and recorders

Modern DVD recorders often support
additional formats, including DVD+/-R/RW, CD-R/RW, MP3, WMA, SVCD, JPEG, PNG, SVG, KAR and MPEG-4 (DivX/XviD). Some also include USB ports or flash
memory readers. Many players are priced from under $/€ 25 and recorders from $/€ 50.

DVD drives for computers usually come with one of two kinds of Regional
Playback Control (RPC), either RPC-1 or RPC-2; This is used to enforce the
publisher's restrictions on what regions of the world the DVD can be played. See
Regional lockout.

[edit]

Competitors and successors

There are several possible successors to DVD being developed by different
consortiums: Sony/Panasonic's Blu-ray Disc (BD),
Toshiba's HD
DVD and Maxell's Holographic
Versatile Disc(HVD).

The first generation of holographic media with 300 GB of storage capacity and
a 160 Mbit/s transfer rate is scheduled for release in late 2006 by Maxell and
its partner, InPhase.

On November 18, 2003, the Chinese news agency Xinhua reported the
final standard of the Chinese government-sponsored Enhanced Versatile
Disc (EVD), and several patents for it. However, since then the format has
generally failed to live up to expectations.

On November 19, 2003, the DVD Forum decided by a
vote of eight to six that HD DVD will be its official HDTV
successor to DVD. This had no effect on the competing Blu-ray Disc Association's
(BDA) determination that its format would succeed DVD, especially since most of
the voters belonged to both groups.

On April
15, 2004, in a
co-op project with TOPPAN Printing Co., the electronic giant Sony Corp.
successfully developed the paper disc, a storage medium
that is made out of 51% paper and offers up to 25 GB of storage, about five
times more than the standard 4.7 GB DVD. The disc can be easily cut with
scissors and recycled, offering foolproof data security and an
environment-friendly storage media.

As reported in a summer, 2005, issue of Popular Mechanics,
it is not yet clear which technology will win the format war over DVD. HD DVD
discs contain less information than Blu-ray discs (15GB vs. 25GB for single
layer, 30GB vs. 50GB for dual layer), but Blu-ray requires changes in
manufacturing machinery and techniques.

In April, 2000,
Sonic Solutions and Ravisent announced hDVD, an HDTV extension to DVD that presaged
the HD formats that debuted 6 years later. [5]

This situation—multiple new formats fighting as the successor to a format
approaching purported obsolescence—previously appeared as the "war of the
speeds" in the record industry of the 1950s; see gramophone record for
details of that situation. It is also, of course, similar to the VHS/Betamax war
in consumer video recorders in the late 1970s.

It is possible that neither Blu-ray, HD DVD, nor alternative next-generation
optical recording products will succeed. The storage capacities of hard disk
drives and solid-state memory have grown faster than those of optical discs
(since CD's introduction year, 1983, storage capacity of HDDs grew by a factor
of about 100,000, from 5 MB to 500 GB, while the capacity of Blu-ray is only 90
times larger than CD), and all three are much more capable of storing general
consumer content —such as photos, music, and video— than in the past. Hard disk
drives having a few terabytes of storage capacity will be on the market before
2008. A terabyte is equivalent to about 2000 CD-ROMs, 130 DVD-9s, or 20
dual-layer BDs. However, hard disk drives and memory cards are at the moment
hundreds of times more expensive than optical discs (US$50 or more compared to
$0.50), so they will never replace discs as a publishing format. The
price per gigabyte of a hard disk drive, $0.20 ($100/500GB), is growing closer
to that of a DVD-ROM, $0.06 ($0.50/8.5GB), or BD-ROM, $0.03 ($1.50/50GB), or
recordable DVD-5, $0.10 ($0.50/4.7GB), and is lower than the cost of a
recordable DVD-9, $0.30 ($2.50/8.5GB), or BD-RE25, $1.20 ($30/25GB). Direct
access to large amounts of information is much more convenient with a hard disk
drive. As true broadband (25 Mbps or higher) becomes widely available in
a decade or two, physical media will become less important as a distribution
format.

The new generations of optical formats have restricted access (anti-copy
mechanisms), and it is therefore possible that consumers will ignore them as
they did with Super Audio CD.

[edit]

Direct-to-DVD

The popularity of DVDs has caused the term "direct-to-DVD"
to widely replace "Direct-to-video" (see
main article). However, the lucrative market for DVDs has resulted in less
stigma for direct-to-DVD releases as compared to direct-to-video releases. Some
minor films can be made with a small budget and turn a profit on DVD sales
alone, and some are made specifically for this purpose.

[edit]

See also

Camcorder

Digital camera
integration

DeCSS

DivX

DIVX

DualDisc

Dual
layer

DVD
Formats

DVD
Forum

DVD TV Games

DVD-D
disposable DVD

DVD-R (DVD
recordable)

EZ-D disposable
DVD

FireWire

Updatable firmware

Home cinema

MPEG-1

MPEG-2

Netflix
(DVD rental)

Nuon

PVR

Special Edition

Superbit

UOP

MultiLevel
Recording

DVD cover art

List of
video players (software)

Inphase Tecnologies Holographic system.

[edit]

References

DVD Demystified, Jim Taylor; McGraw-Hill Professional; ISBN
0071350268 (2nd edition, December 22, 2000)

DVD Authoring and Production, Ralph Labarge; CMP Books; ISBN
1578200822 (August 2001)

Bennett, Hugh. Understanding Recordable & Rewritable DVD.
Cupertino: Optical Storage Technology Association, Apr. 2004. [6]

[edit]

External links

[edit]

Official

DVD Forum

DVD+RW Alliance

DVD Copy Control Association and the Content
Scramble System (CSS)

[edit]

Technology

Understanding Recordable &
Rewritable DVD by Hugh Bennett

DVD recorder formats
explained

[edit]

DVD collection

The Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD
News, reviews, and more

Cinema de Merde Reviews and essays on
bad and cheesy movies on video

DVD Aficionado organizer

The Digital Bits-DVD news and
reviews

IGN | Upcoming DVD releases at IGN

DVD reviews and analysis at The DVD
Insider

A Weekly Guide to DVD Movie Releases &
Reviews at DVD Movie Guide

Weekly look at DVDs coming out at Hero
Realm

DVD Anthology Collectors Community

[edit]

Other

DVD Frequently Asked
Questions (and Answers)

DVD Code's Archive to make your
player multiregional

All About
DVD Part 1: DVD Format at DVDSoftwareGuide.com

The
Challenge of DVD Authoring a PDF report at DVD-Copy.com

"DVD Rentals Overtake VHS
Cassettes For First Time," June 19, 2003 article from NBC4 TV

Archive of Region 2 and Region 0 DVDs from
1997 onwards provided by DVDark.co.uk

DVD+RW/+R/-R(W) for
Linux

DVD and DVD+RW
compatibility testing

How DVD works from HowStuffWorks.com

DVD Player CDR Compatibility
list

Home
Video

Magnetic

Betamax - Video
2000 - Video
Cassette Recording - VHS - U-matic

Optical

Blu-ray Disc -
DVD - HD DVD - Laserdisc - SVCD - UMD - VCD

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD"

Categories:
Articles to
be merged | 120 mm
discs | Computer
storage media | Audio
storage | Video
storage | DVD | Consumer
electronics

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