Short for digital versatile disc or digital video disc, a new type of CD-ROM that holds a minimum of 4.7GB (gigabytes), enough for a full-length movie. DVD is excellent for delivering interactive video content - ideal for presentations, exhibitions and training.

Presentations with high quality video and audio can make your organisation standout from the crowd delivering memorable results. Exhibition stands can be kitted out with robust and cost effective DVD players to play back your interactive video content. Training programmes can be put onto DVD utilising some of the excellent features of DVD such as multi-camera angles allowing the viewer to see the action from many views.

The DVD specification supports discs with capacities of from 4.7GB to 17GB and access rates of 600KBps to 1.3 MBps. One of the best features of DVD drives is that they are backward-compatible with CD-ROMs. This means that DVD players can play old CD-ROMs, CD-I disks, and video CDs, as well as new DVD-ROMs. Newer DVD players can also read CD-R disks. DVD uses MPEG-2 to compress video data.

Not unlike the different flavours of CDs, there are five physical formats, or books, of DVD:

• DVD-ROM is a high-capacity data storage medium
  
• DVD-Video is a digital storage medium for feature-length motion pictures
  
• DVD-Audio is an audio-only storage format similar to CD-Audio
  
• DVD-R offers a write-once, read-many storage format akin to CD-R
  
• DVD-RAM was the first rewritable (erasable) flavour of DVD to come to market and has subsequently found competition in the rival DVD-RW and DVD+RW format