In 2001, the DVD Forum approved the first DVD Multi specification – covering all currently developed formats approved by the Forum. Hitachi and Panasonic were first off the mark to announce DVD Multi-compliant drives, providing read/write support for all DVD Forum recordable DVD specifications – DVD-RAM, DVD-R and DVD-RW – as well as read/write support for CD-R and CD-RW media. Importantly, however, formats created outside the DVD Forum – notably the DVD+R and DVD+RW formats supported by Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard and Philips and other members of the DVD+RW Alliance – were not covered by the DVD Multi specifications.
In the autumn of 2002 it looked as though the longstanding and damaging standards issue that had so hampered the mass-market acceptance of DVD recording equipment was about to come to an end, with two companies – Sony and NEC – announcing drives that would support both DVD Forum and DVD+RW Alliance formats!
Supporting a number of interfaces – IDE/ATAPI, USB2 and FireWire – these drives exhibited differing performance characteristics for the various media they handled. The table below gives an indication of what these early DVD Multiwriter drives were capable of, providing a best composite specification of the two drives:
| Media | Write | Rewrite | Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| DVD-R | 4x | ||
| DVD-RW | 2x | ||
| DVD+R | 4x | ||
| DVD+RW | 2.4x | ||
| CD-R | 24x | ||
| CD-RW | 10x | ||
| DVD-ROM | 12x | ||
| CD-ROM | 40x |
- History of DVD development and birth of the DVD Forum
- DVD Formats
- DVDs – digital versatile disks – how they’re made and how they work
- DVD OSTA
- DVD File Systems
- CDR-RW Compatibility Issues
- DVD Encoding
- DVD Content Protection
- Regional codes for DVDs
- DVD-ROM
- DVD-Vdeo
- DVD DivX Codec
- DVD-Audio
- DVD Recordable Formats
- DVD-R – write once recordable DVDs
- DVD-RAM
- DVD+RW
- DVD-RW
- DVD+R
- DVD Multi-Writers