DVD

A DVD, meaning digital versatile disc or digital video disc, is a digital optical disc data storage format that holds far more data than a compact disc of the same physical size, letting it carry a feature-length film, an album's worth of audio, or ordinary computer files. Two rival groups worked on the technology in the mid-1990s, Philips and Sony's Multimedia Compact Disc and a Super Density Disc backed by Toshiba, Time Warner, Matsushita, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer, Thomson and JVC, until five computer companies, IBM, Apple, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, announced in May 1995 that they would only support a single standard; the rival camps agreed to merge their technology into one format by September 15, 1995, and finalized its specification that December. The format launched in Japan on November 1, 1996 and in the United States on March 24, 1997, and a standard single-layer, single-sided disc holds 4.7 gigabytes, rising to 17.08 gigabytes for a double-sided, dual-layer disc.