Glossary of Terms – What Is DVD?

DVD, which is also known as “digital versatile disc” or “digital video disc”, is a kind of digital optical disc storage format invented and developed by Panasonic, Philips, Sony, and Toshiba in 1995. It is usually used to play standard resolution of the film, high-quality music as well as large-capacity storage data in your daily life and work. DVD and CD or Blu-ray Disc are similar in the appearance with the diameter of 80 mm and 120 mm.

Now, we will tell you some basic and available information about DVD, such as the applications of different kinds of DVD, the capacity specifications, and more. Please read on.

Application

Unlike CD, DVD has been designed as multipurpose disc at the outset. The sizes of the original DVD can be divided into the following five sub-specifications:

• DVD-ROM: it is used to store computer data;
• DVD-Video: it is used to save video files;
• DVD-Audio: it is used to store music files;
• DVD-R: it can be used to write discs only once;
• DVD-RAM: it is a kind of rewritable write discs.

Obviously, DVD can save a lot of files for you. But data loss issue always happens by accident. In this situation, you may want to know how to recover data from DVD? In fact, you can utilize a third-party professional data recovery program to do this job. Here, we suggest using the dedicated MiniTool Power Data Recovery. This software has five recovery modules and its “CD/DVD Recovery” module is specially designed to recover your lost and deleted files from damaged, scratched or defective CD and DVD disks.

If you don’t know how to operate this recovery module, you can read this previous post to learn the detailed steps: Recover Files with “CD/DVD Recovery” Module.

Capacity Specifications of DVD

When calculating the capacity of a DVD, 1GB represents 1,000,000,000 bytes (10003 bytes) rather than the usual 1GiB (1,073,741,824 bytes, 10243 bytes). Here, we will show some common types of DVD in the daily life and work.

DVD-5

DVD-5 is a specification from the DVD Forum. It has the nominal capacity of 4.7GB single-sided single-layer DVD and the actual capacity is 4480MB.

DVD-9

DVD-9 is a single-sided double-layer DVD with the nominal capacity of 8.5GB and the actual capacity is 7.92GiB.

DVD-10

DVD-10 is a double-sided single-layer DVD with the nominal capacity of 9.4GB and the actual capacity is 8.75GiB.

DVD-14

DVD-14 is a single-sided single-layer + single-sided double-layer DVD with the nominal capacity of 13.2GB. It is not widely used in the world.

DVD-18

DVD-18 is a double-sided double-layer DVD with the nominal capacity of 17GB and the actual capacity is 15.8GiB.

The Formats of DVD-Video

Normally, DVD-video has these two directories: AUDIO_TS which is reserved to DVD-AUDIO directory, and VIDEO_TS which is used to all DVD-VIDEO, including audio, video, subtitles, and so forth.