DVDs have become ubiquitous. Whenever we want to watch a movie or listen to some music we reach out for a DVD. Here are some basic facts about the DVD:

What is a DVD?

DVD is short of Digital Versatile Disk. A DVD-ROM closely resembles a CD or compact disk. However, a DVD-ROM is formatted to hold far more data. While a CD commonly has a capacity of 650 megabytes, the smallest capacity DVD can store about seven times more data, or 4.38 gigabytes (GB). A DVD-ROM encodes data in the form of a spiraling trail of pits and lands separated by mere nanometers. There are various kinds of DVDs. The DVD-ROM is the most common. It is a disk that cannot be written over. Blank DVDs with designations like DVD-R and DVD+R are formatted, recordable DVDs. The -R and +R refer to competing format standards, but both will record movies, audio or other data. The best examples of DVD-ROMs are the music and film DVDs that can be bought off the shelf.

What is DVD authoring?

Authoring is the process of collecting audio, video, menus, subtitles, etc onto a DVD. In common parlance it is called burning. This is done on DVD authoring software. There are numerous DVD authoring programs but which you use depends on your need, be it personal, professional or corporate.

How is DVD duplication carried out?

Duplication is an industrial process where a glass master used to physically stamp copies out like a cookie cutter.

What is DVD video?

DVD video is technically superior and the closest we have to studio quality video. Digital studio master tapes are usually encoded from to MPEG-2 format to create a DVD video. The encoding process uses lossy compression that removes redundant information.

What is a DVD menu?

A DVD menu allows easy access to the titles without having to scan the DVD. This is both convenient and accurate. A DVD could have a main menu with 4 title sets each containing a menu and a single title. All the titles are made from multiple input files and each input file is one chapter. What is a menu? Menus are just an mpeg file with subtitles. The basic mpeg is the background and the subtitles produce the menu buttons. The background can either be a short movie or a still image converted to an mpeg. MPEG stands for "Motion Picture Experts Group." It stands for the committee that dreamed up the MPEG-2 compression algorithm. MPEG-2 is the de-facto standard compression technology used for DVD video.