DVD-Video

DVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVD discs, and is currently the dominant consumer video format in Asia, North America,Europe, and Australia. Discs using the DVD-Video specification require a DVD drive and an MPEG-2 decoder (e. g., a DVD player, or a computer DVD drive with a software DVD player). Commercial DVD movies are encoded using a combination MPEG-2 compressed video and audio of varying formats (often multi-channel formats as described below). Typically, the data rate for DVD movies ranges from 3 Mbit/s to 9.5 Mbit/s, and the bit rate is usually adaptive. It was first available for retail around March 26, 1997.

The DVD-Video specification was created by DVD Forum and can be obtained from DVD Format/Logo Licensing Corporation for a fee of $5,000. The specification is not publicly available and every subscriber must sign a non-disclosure agreement. Certain information in the DVD Book is proprietary and confidential.

Video data

To record moving pictures, DVD-Video uses either H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2 compression at up to 9.8 Mbit/s (9,800 kbit/s) or MPEG-1 Part 2 compression at up to 1.856 Mbit/s (1,856 kbit/s). DVD-Video supports video with a bit depth of 8-bits per color YCbCr with 4 : 2 : 0 chroma subsampling.