Dvd

[daveesp]

Sorry i sound so dumb but can someone plz give me a rundown on the difference between CD and DVD+ and - ,also can you give me the uses of each .

Thankyou ........

[Jamey]

Well, firstly there are the two stamped formats: CD-ROM and DVD-ROM. Both CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs can only be made in a factory with a special "pressing" machine. They are the sort you can buy in the shops with music or software on them.

 

Then for writing or burning your own data to CDs, there are two types: CD-R and CD-RW. They stand for CD recordable and CD rewriteable, respectively. CD-Rs are very cheap nowadays (less than £20 for a 100 spindle) and typically store 700 MB of data or 90 minutes of music. Any data you put on them cannot be taken off, i.e. they are "write once". But you may keep adding data until it is "full up", so to speak. This is called making a multisession disc.

 

CD-RWs are different because they have the capability to be erased. This is where the special chemical dye in the disc is "reset" so that new data can be written to the disc. It doesn't work like a hard disk as such because it is not quick to simply delete one file and add another. It is more like: add some data, wipe the disc and add some other data (reusable). That covers all types of CD.

 

As for DVDs, there are few things to take into consideration. There is DVD-R and DVD-RW. They work similarly to CD-R and CD-RW except the capacity is 4.7 GB rather than 700 MB. Then there is the other main format where the '-' is replaced with a '+'. So you get DVD+R and DVD+RW. I'll let you follow the link and find out the differences. Finally, there is also DVD-R DL, which is a dual layer technology where there can be a huge amount of data in multiple layers on a single disc, something like 8.5 GB. And there's one more format too! DVD-RAM which is a lesser-used format nowadays.

 

So, as you can see the DVD world is full of various formats. Most computer DVD burners available today support all of the formats I have mentioned. If you are burning a DVD to use in a DVD player or another non-computer machine, you must make sure that the player supports the disc format you intend to write to. I hope that covers most of what you wanted to know.