DVD

Stands for "Digital Versatile Disc." It can also stand for "Digital Video Disc," but with the multiple uses of DVDs, the term "Digital Versatile Disc" is more correct. Yep, the technology naming people just love to confuse us. A DVD is a high-capacity optical disc that looks like a CD, but can store much more information. While a CD can store 650 to 700 MB of data, a single-layer, single-sided DVD can store 4.7 GB of data. This enables massive computer applications and full-length movies to be stored on a single DVD.

The advanced DVD formats are even more amazing. There is a two-layer standard that doubles the single-sided capacity to 8.5 GB. These disks can also be double-sided, ramping up the maximum storage on a single disc to 17 GB. That's 26 times more data than a CD can hold! To be able to read DVDs in your computer you'll need a DVD-ROM drive. Fortunately, DVD players can also read CDs. To play DVD movies on your computer, you'll need to have a graphics card with a DVD-decoder, which most computers now have.

Published: 2002