A Revolution (DVD Forum)

Member Name: loulou6

Product:	DVD Forum
Date:	16/11/00 (109 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: the turning point of movies

Disadvantages: none

Nearly every movie produced today is available on DVD, and many older movies are being moved to this format(albeit slowly). Often, a movie comes out on DVD before it comes out on video tape, because the manufacturing and distribution costs for them are so much lower!

By bringing outstanding picture and sound to our favourite films, the DVD format is doing for movies exactly what CDs did for music.

A DVD is remarkably similar to a CD - it has just been designed to hold more data! A standard DVD holds about seven times more data than a CD does. This huge capacity means that it has enough room to store a full-length, MPEG-2-encoded movie, as well as a lot of other information. DVD can also be used to store almost eight hours of CD-quality music per side (although this is not a very common practice yet).

DVDs are of the same diameter and thickness as CDs, and they are made using some of the same materials and manufacturing methods. Like a CD, the data on a DVD is encoded in the form of small pits and bumps in the track of the disc.

For single-sided discs, the label is silk-screened onto the nonreadable side. Double-sided discs are printed only on the nonreadable area near the hole in the middle. A double-sided, double-layer DVD would have 30 miles of data!

About 10 million DVD players have been sold since March 1997 (since the first DVD player hit the market).

Now, why would you want one? well, the quality of the picture and sound is better than on a videotape, and DVDs maintain their high quality over time. With a DVD player, you can jump right to a certain part of the movie, without rewinding and fast-forwarding, so you can easily watch a favourite scene again and again if you want to.

Movies can be seen in wide-screen (letterbox) format, bringing you closer to the experience of watching the movie in the cinema, or in TV format, which fills the screen of most television sets. Also, DVDs ofte
n have interesting extras, such as a director's commentary or cast biographies(great, if you're a bit of a film buff).

As recordable DVD players are very expensive, I would suggest that you purchase a cheap and chearful one, the best by far is the Proline 1000 (which is not region specific and only cost 150 quid from woolies) at the same price as a Video recorder - it's a bargain, and you can get your DVD collection going straight away.

Once you see the quality of watching films this way, you'll never know why it took you so long!

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