Publishing in the Age of DVD

At present, Books A: DVD-ROM and B: DVD-Video have been completed and lay the foundation for the DVD media format. Books D: DVD Recordable and Book E: DVD RAM have recently been announced, and Book C: DVD-Audio is expected to be available in 1998.

Physical Specifications

DVD is enabled by technical advances in both optical media data capacity and digital video compression algorithms. On the optical media side, DVD achieves its superior data capacity by increasing the density of the pits on the disc surface as well as by using a more efficient error correction scheme. Increased pit density means more bits are available for storage and better error correction results in more of those bits being available for program or data storage. DVD and CD optical media specifications are as follows:

 
  DVD CD
Disc Diameter 120 mm (5 in.) 120 mm (5 in.)
Disc Thickness 1.2 mm (2 bounded .6mm layers) 1.2 mm
Track pitch 0.74 µm 1.6 µm
Laser Wavelength 650 or 635 nm red laser 790 nm red laser
Numerical aperture 0.6 0.45
Minimum pit length 0.4 µm 0.83 µm
Error correction RS-PC CIRC
Signal modulation 8-16 (EFM+) 8-14 (EFM)
Reference scanning 3.49 m/s (single layer) 1.2 to 1.4 m/s
velocity 3.84 m/s (double layer)  
Data capacity DVD-5 single sided,single layer; 4.7GB
DVD-9 single sided,dual layer; 8.5GB
DVD-10 double sided,single layer; 9.4GB
DVD-18 double sided,double layer; 17GB		 650 megabytes
Maximum data rate 10.00 Mbps (Megabits per second) 1.4112 Mbps

Table 3: DVD and CD physical specifications

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©1997-1998 Sonic Solutions. The Sonic Solutions logo, Sonic, Sonic Solutions, Sonic DVD Creator, DVDit,DVD PrePlay, DVD Producer, DVD Studio, Sonic Lightspeed, Sonic MediaNet, SonicStudio, Bit Budget, High-Density Audio, First in DVD and DVD Ready are trademarks and NoNOISE is a registered trademark of Sonic Solutions. Dolby Digital is a trademark of Dolby Laboratories. All other brand or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.