Have you ever wondered why DVD is so popular a medium? It is interesting to note that in recent times the sale of Digital DVD players has skyrocketed. That should tell you how popular they have become.
The reason for such widespread popularity is the superior quality in both video and audio. A DVD movie is compressed in a high bit rate video and audio. If one compares a DVD and CD, then it would be found that the two encoding format are radically ifferent from each other.
A CD movie is compressed using the MPEG 1 compression technique. If bit rate is increased, it gives higher quality video file. Due to constraint in resolution, an MPEG 1 file could not go over 352 x 288 limitations in a CD. The CD player also does not support playing a CD, which is compressed, in a higher resolution.
To play a DVD you need Digital DVD players. A DVD in itself is the acronym of Digital Video Disk. The Digital DVD Players play disks made under two technical standards of DVD video and DVD audio. The player hardware has to be connected to output hardware, preferably a Television set. There are some portable players with a small LCD screen attached to it; but it fails to play the DVD to its full potential due to hardware portability.
Digital DVD players have to perform some basic tasks like reading a DVD in ISO or UDF 1.2 format. It can optionally decrypt the packed data in CSS and/or Macrovision. In DVD there is a protection code called Regional lockout Code. It enables the DVD of a certain portion of the world to be played in that part of the world only. The DVD player has the capability of changing the regional code; but it is only limited to change 5 times and not more. After that, the player cannot play DVD from other regions.
Digital DVD players have the ability to decode MPEG 2 video stream with maximum 10 Mbit/s of data. It is the peak range. For a continuous output the data rate is 8 Mbit/s. The sound is decoded from the MP2, PCM or AC3 format. The video resolution that can be obtained from these high quality data is quite high. The maximum of 720x576 is there for the video quality.
Apart from playing the DVD, digital DVD players can play some other formats also. It can play audio CDs, which are the CDDA, mp3, etc. They also can play their earlier generation CDs, which is the Video CD format. They also have the capability of playing DTS, the Dolby Digital Theater System. The home cinema decoder is one of the main features of a digital DVD player. Apart from the formats mentioned above, some newer formats are coming to bolster the video scene.
All the formats are variants of MPEG, as the x264 is the MPEG 4, layer 10. Another popular compression method is the MPEG 4 ASP compression more popularly known as the DivX. The PC DVD ROMs can play almost all the formats out there. There is Xvid format, contained in the AVI container.
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