subject: Different Types Of Dvd Media Uses [print this page] DVDs can still cause some confusion for the average consumer of home electronics, even though the format has been around for nearly two decades now. Certainly, at its very introduction there was even some disagreement over the name, as some claimed that the acronym stood for Digital Versatile Disc, as a result of the fact that any sort of information can be encoded on it, while others believed that Digital Movie Disc was meant, simply because the only real application they had been put to was as a movie format. Even today there could be some confusion, given the proposal of successor formats for example Blue-Ray Digital video disc and HD-DVD.
Yes, competing formats isn't anything new to DVDs. Barely three years after its debut within the marketplace, a new sort of Digital video disc threatened to undo the Digital video disc format as we still know it these days. Certainly, this new format had even been promoted a brand new type of Digital video disc, but had it in fact taken hold there would be no such thing as the Dvd we now know - which is impossible, as a result of the sheer inanity with the scheme in the first place (which inanity will be evident soon with the retelling).
Conceived as an alternative to movie rental at the time, which involved folks going to a movie rental store like Hollywood Movie or Blockbuster Movie and physically taking out and returning discs, DIVX, or Digital Video Express, was the brainchild of now-defunct Circuit City and an entertainment law firm (yes, lawyers, not engineers) and was infamous for having created some confusion within the marketplace with its promotional marketing touting itself as being something more than Dvd, which was labeled "Basic" Dvd.
Nonetheless, unlike so-called Basic Dvd, DIVX needed unique hardware for playback and usually did not feature any of the extras or special features that's come to be associated with DVDs. Moreover, DIVX titles have been practically usually accessible only in pan-and-scan instead of the original theatrical aspect ratio usually discovered on Digital video disc. This kind of "design" flaws turned house theater enthusiasts against DIVX, and even privacy advocates have been against it since DIVX usage could have involved the regular transmission of extremely personal details more than telephone lines.
With DIVX, you would buy a disc to watch, and keep the disc until for instance time as you decided to watch it again - for one more fee. Sounds odd? Certainly, consumers couldn't figure it out, either, and DIVX was out of company hardly a year right after its introduction.
