Let's begin with application formats. The good news is that every DVD movie
that you buy or rent is in a single application format called DVD-Video. All
DVD players and DVD drives can play DVD-Video. Now the bad news, you might
create your own DVD-Video movie and it might not play in your DVD player.
Sounds odd, doesn't it? Let's move on to writable formats.
Although DVD disks look like CDs, they are not the same thing. The biggest
difference is that a DVD can hold much more information than a CD. Most CDs
hold 650 or 700 megabytes of data, movies or music. Most DVDs hold 4.7
gigabytes, or about 7 times more information than a CD. This extra capacity
allows entire Hollywood movies to fit on a single disk. If you want to
create your own DVD movie, you will need to get a writable version of one of
these DVD disks. This is where it starts to get complicated.