It's likely one of those things that you see around everywhere but had never gotten to really know, like a literary classic by Shakespeare which is much revered but not actually much read. Or like how we are all surrounded by modern technology without any understanding of how they work.
Well, the DVD has been around for almost two decades now but even from the very beginning there had been a little confusion about them, beginning with their very name: did the acronym stand for Digital Versatile Disc, as some claimed because any kind of information can be encoded on it, or was Digital Video Disc really meant as others believed, as that's been their only real application, as a video format? Confusion, unfortunately, reigns to this day, what with the introduction of successor formats like Blue-Ray DVD and the defunct HD-DVD. This article is first in a series that will look at many things DVD, starting with a general overview of the DVD that will serve to introduce further installments to come.
Described as an optical disc media storage format, DVDs have been used since their debut in 1995 as a means of mass data storage, particularly video, which is data-intensive. Now even though DVDs are of the same exact dimensions as a Compact Disc or CD, they can store over six time more data, with the latest DVD formats, like the aforementioned Blue-Ray, capable of many times more than the original DVD format - 50 GB to barely 5GB!
Many kinds of DVD formats exist nowadays, even though it's been almost twenty years since their initial availability to home consumers: DVD-ROM (Read-Only Memory) for playback; DVD-R and DVD+R for data to be written (only once, however); DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM for the multiple writing of data. The history of DVD technology also includes some formats not commonly seen or now discontinued, such as DVD-Audio and DIVX (not to be confused with DivX, the computer video codec).
DVD-Audio was a short-lived attempt to replace the audio CD with a format capable of sophisticated multi-channel surround sound. DVD-Audio probably never had a chance, however, as consumers were reluctant to not only replace their existing CD collections but also buying new hardware to listen with. But as if that idea didn't seem bad enough, a mere three years after DVD's debut something called DIVX, or Digital Video Express, was introduced - to become one of the biggest technological turkeys of all time - and the subject of our next article.
Author Resource:-
Article by Paul Wise, who has dealt with Blank Media, also recommends Tapes.com for the solution to Blank Media
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