What do the letters DVD stand for?
“DIGITAL VERSATILE DISC” V is for Versatile and not Video….. DVD (“Digital Versatile Disc” or “Digital Video Disc”) is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. DVDs resemble Compact Discs in that they have the exact appearance (i.e. diameter: 120mm or 4.72in., occasionally 80mm or 3.15in.) and both are optical storage media so similar that a DVD reader or writer can usually read CDs, but DVDs are encoded in a different format of much greater density, allowing a data storage capacity 8 times greater (single-layer, single-sided). All read-only DVD discs, regardless of type, are DVD-ROM discs. This includes replicated (factory pressed), recorded (burned), video, audio, and data DVDs. A DVD with properly formatted and structured video content is a DVD-Video disc. DVDs with properly formatted and structured audio content are DVD-Audio discs. Everything else, (including other types of DVD discs with video co
well i thought it was digital versatile disc but looking at wiki and a couple of other places both are acceptable. “DVD” was originally used as an initialism for the unofficial term “digital videodisk”.[2] It was reported in 1995, at the time of the specification finalization, that the letters officially stood for “digital versatile disc” (due to non-video applications)[3], however, the text of the press release announcing the specification finalization only refers to the technology as “DVD”, making no mention of what (if anything) the letters stood for.[1] A newsgroup FAQ written by Jim Taylor (a prominent figure in the industry) claims that four years later, in 1999, the DVD Forum stated that the format name was simply the three letters “DVD” and did not stand for anything.[4] The official DVD specification documents have never defined DVD.
All of the following have been proposed as the words behind the letters DVD. • Delayed, very delayed (referring to the many late releases of DVD formats) • Diversified, very diversified (referring to the proliferation of recordable formats and other spinoffs) • Digital venereal disease (referring to piracy and copying of DVDs) • Dead, very dead (from naysayers who predicted DVD would never take off) • Digital video disc (the original meaning suggested by some of DVD’s creators) • Digital versatile disc (the meaning later suggested by some of DVD’s creators) • Nothing And the official answer is? “Nothing.” The original acronym came from “digital video disc.” Some members of the DVD Forum (see 6.1) tried to express that DVD goes far beyond video by retrofitting the painfully contorted phrase “digital versatile disc,” but this has never been officially accepted by the DVD Forum as a whole. The consensus is now that DVD, as an international standard, is simply three letters. After all, who
originally it stood fopr Digital Versatile Disc. Unfortunately the way that the language evolves through common errors, it is acceptable to say Video… however as you can use a DVD for data storage and more, (hence the “Versatile”!) I shall never succumb to the “lazy” version and shall always stick to the “proper” meaning of versatile disc.
