Page 2 of 8: Application Formats
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.