Digital Video
From time to time the PC Technology Guide has to rearrange the information, often because the amount of information on a topic becomes too big to hold on a single page. Here, the information on various digital video formats has been separated into distinct pages, linked from the introductory information below.
advertisement
VCD
Before the existence of DVD there was a need for the optical disk of the day, CD, to deliver more in entertainment, information and software, particulary regarding multimedia. The VideoCD was born of this necessity, devised by industry consortium Phillips, Sony, Matsushita and JVC. The specifications, referred to as the White Book, were agreed in 1993, creating an optical disk format that supported full-screen, full-motion video. Importantly, it was also designed to work on all relevant platforms, including televisions, games consoles and computers.
Learn more on the new VideoCD page.
SVCD
It's estimated that VCD players were in over 20 million Chinese homes by the end of the millennium, and it was in China that VCD's successor, Super VCD (SVCD), was developed. Essentially moving from MPEG-1 to MPEG-2 encoding, this provided for higher resolution video and larger, variable bitrates. With hyperlinked menus, still images and subtitling, the SVCD was closer in features to DVD, but with far less capacity, so feature films may be split across two, three or even more disks.
Learn more on the new SVCD page.
miniDVD
The miniDVD offers DVD quality video on a regular 650MB CD, which gives space for about 15 minutes of video. Adopted mainly for home video usage, the format was quickly overtaken as writable DVD formats became more affordable.
Learn more on the new miniDVD page.
DivX
A complicated story, initially DivX was the name of work developed by the hacker community for ripping digital video. It was an encoding based on Microsoft's MPEG-4, and gained popularity for its strong compression ratio. Now, though, DivX is the brand name for encoding products released by DivX Inc on an open license, though even that development had its twists and turns. Similarly based on MPEG-4, DivX is popular in the Linux community, but has gained some wider acceptance in the Windows world.
Learn more on the new DivX page.
DV format
As camcorders grew in popularity it became clear that their data storage needs were increasing. To meet the need a new generation emeraged using the new Digital Video format. Based on cassette, it provided the capacity needs required, and moreover stored the data in digital format, ready for easy transferrance to PCs without the need for analogue-to-digital conversion. With lossless compression, the format captures high quality video and marries perfectly with home video editing suites, helping to usher in a new era of home movie making.
Learn more on the new DV format page.
Formats comparison
The principal technical characteristics of the digital video formats discussed above are summarised on the new formats comparison page.
Last Update: Tue Jun 16th 2009