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Text 5. DVD
DVD is an optical disc storage media format that is used for playback of movies with
high video and sound quality and for storing data. DVDs are similar in appearance to
compact discs.
During the early 1990s there were two high density optical storage standards in
development; one was the Multimedia Co mpact Dis c (MMCD), backed by Philips and
Sony, and the other was the Super Disc (SD), supported by 8 major consumer electronics
giants, including Toshiba and Time-Warner. IBM led an effort to unite the various
companies behind a single standard, anticipating a repeat of the costly format war between
VHS and Betama x in the 1980s . The result was the DVD format, announced in September
of 1995. The official DVD specification was released in Version 1.0 in September, 1996. It
is maintained by the DVD Forum, formerly the DVD Consortium, consisting of the ten
founding companies and over 220 additional me mbers. The first DVD players and discs
were available in November of 1996 in Japan and in March of 1997 in the United States .
By the spring of 1999, the price of a DVD player had dropped below the $300 ma rk. At
that point Wal-Mart began to offer DVD players for sale in its stores. When Wal-Mart
began selling DVD discs in stores DVDs only represented a small part of their video
inventory, VHS tapes of movies made up the remainder. As of 2004, the situation is now
reversed. Most retail stores mainly offer DVD discs for sale, and VHS copies of movies
make up a minority of the sales.
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. In Japan, this proved
to be a huge selling point due to the fact that the PS2 was much cheaper than many of the
DVD players available there. As a result, many electronic stores that normally didn't carry
video game consoles carried PS2s.
"DVD" was originally an acronym for "di g i tal vi de o di s c" ; s o me me mb ers o f t h e DVD
Forum believe that it s hould s tand for "digital versatile disc", to indicate its potential for
non-video applications. Toshiba, which maintains the official DVD Forum site, adheres to
the interpretation of "digital versatile disc." The DVD Forum never reached a consensus on
the matter, however, and so today the official name of the format is simply "DVD"; the
letters do not "officially" stand for anything.
A DVD can contain:
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