The DVD Standard

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DVD is a combined media and formatting standard for storing digital data on optical discs. The DVD standard has been adopted and is supported by a worldwide group of consumer electronics companies, movie studios, and other content makers.

Hard Facts About DVD

The fundamental physical data format for DVD is called DVD-ROM. This is a read-only format based on the file format OSTA UDF ISO/IEC 13346:1995. It simply allows data to be retrieved from a DVD disc. All DVD data format standards are built on top of the DVD-ROM format. Of these various logical encoding standard, the DVD-Video API is built to handle DVD-Video.

DVD-Video is a data format standard for high-quality digital video and audio. It provides one MPEG-2 video stream, a maximum of eight audio streams, a maximum of 32 subpicture graphics streams, and one PCI or MPEG-2 multichannel audio stream. DVD-Video data is transferred from the disc into the track buffer at 11.08 Mbps. After further processing, the actual combined maximum bit rate for all the streams is 9.8 Mbps. DVD-Video supports both NTSC and PAL video broadcast formats.

DVD-Video Fundamentals

DVD-Video has become a very popular means for storing and distributing video data for movies. With this background, it is tempting to begin thinking of data stored in DVD-Video format as organized into one great big series of sequential frames that make up a movie. After all, this is how movies are stored on film and it is also how movies are stored on videotape.

Unlike film or videotape, DVD-Video does not rely on the real physical structure of the storage media to organize the presentation data. Instead, DVD-Video provides a logical, not physical, standard for organizing and retrieving digital video data. DVD-Video does this by storing two types of data in any recording: presentation data and navigational data.

Presentation data is the actual content that the user sees. A DVD-Video recording can contain many individual pieces of presentation data called programs. Each program receives an internal address within the DVD-Video recording. Navigational data stored in the recording provides the DVD player with the addresses of the individual programs along with sequencing instructions that define their playback order. In this way, a DVD-Video recording is less like a motion picture on film and more like a slide projector with a list to describe the display order for the slides.

Additionally, the DVD-Video format provides the content author with the opportunity to place interactive menus within the recording. These menus allow the user to control the playback order of the presentation data within boundaries set by the author.

In addition to these fundamentals, DVD-Video supports many additional presentation and control features. The DVD-Video API shields the application developer from much of the complexity and mundane details that accompany working with DVD-Video data. The following topics contain additional introductory information on various DVD-Video features:

Further general information about DVD-Video is available through third-party publications or on the World Wide Web.

 Last updated on Thursday, April 08, 2004

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