DVD Chatter

You know you’ve seen a good DVD when you can’t wait to tell your friends about it.

Before DVDs there were video tapes and although they both let you watch movies, DVDs have a far higher video and audio quality and they’re easier to skip sections and many come with a menu system to make finding particular sections even easier.

DVD at the Movies

DVDs were invented in 1995 and work in a similar way to CDs although they can store six times as much data making them ideal for high quality movies.

When you rent or buy a DVD you’re probably not too concerned about how it works or what the specific data format is, but there have been several formats as the medium has developed.

Most recently, double-layering was introduced which increased storage from 4.7Gb on a single-layer disc to 8.54Gb.

Burn Your Own DVD

There are several recordable DVD formats which can cause confusion. They are DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW and DVD-RAM. And, just to confuse the matter even further, DVD-R is available in two formats.

You can create or burn your own DVDs just as you burn a CD. The technology is essentially the same but, of course, you can get a lot more data onto a DVD. You don’t have to worry about the different formats as all modern DVD recorders can write DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW discs.

Blu-ray

Just when you thought it was safe to discard your CDs and embrace the DVD, two new formats were released and between 2006 and 2008 Blu-ray and HD DVD competed for domination. As we now know, Blu-ray won out and a dual-layer Blu-ray disc can store between 50-100Gb of data!

However, Blu-ray has been slow to take off, mainly due to the higher cost of the medium but also because there is a large DVD user-base who seem very happy with DVD quality and see no need to upgrade.

HDV

In case you think Blu-ray will be the end of disc format wars, be forewarned that the HDV (Holographic Versatile Disc) is under development. It can currently store around 500Gb of information but they have the capacity to hold up to 6 Terabytes! To date, no company has released a HDV disc but the major production companies have announced plans to release 500Gb and 1Tg HDVD is 20019/20. We’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, the not-so-humble DVD (and Blu-ray) seems to fulfil the viewing and storage requirements of the vast majority of people and it looks like we can continue to use them without fear of them being superseded for the next nine or ten years at least!