How CDs Work

CDs and DVDs are everywhere these days. Whether they are used to hold music,
data or computer software, they have become the standard medium for distributing
large quantities of information in a reliable package. Compact discs are so easy and
cheap to produce that America Online sends out millions of them every year to
entice new users. And if you have a computer and CD-R drive, you can create your
own CDs, including any information you want.
In this article, we will look at how CDs and CD drives work. We will also look at the
different forms CDs take, as well as what the future holds for this technology.

Cross-section of a CD
Understanding the CD: Material
As discussed in How Analog and Digital Recording Works, a CD can store up to 74
minutes of music, so the total amount of digital data that must be stored on a CD is:
44,100 samples/channel/second x 2 bytes/sample x 2 channels x 74
minutes x 60 seconds/minute = 783,216,000 bytes

To fit more than 783 megabytes (MB) onto a disc only 4.8 inches (12 cm) in
diameter requires that the individual bytes be very small. By examining the physical
construction of a CD, you can begin to understand just how small these bytes are.
A CD is a fairly simple piece of plastic, about four one-hundredths (4/100) of an inch
(1.2 mm) thick. Most of a CD consists of an injection-molded piece of clear
polycarbonate plastic. During manufacturing, this plastic is impressed with
microscopic bumps arranged as a single, continuous, extremely long spiral track of
data. We'll return to the bumps in a moment. Once the clear piece of polycarbonate
is formed, a thin, reflective aluminum layer is sputtered onto the disc, covering the
bumps. Then a thin acrylic layer is sprayed over the aluminum to protect it. The
label is then printed onto the acrylic. A cross section of a complete CD (not to scale)
looks like this:

Understanding the CD: The Spiral

A CD has a single spiral track of data, circling from the inside of the disc to the
outside. The fact that the spiral track starts at the center means that the CD can be
smaller than 4.8 inches (12 cm) if desired, and in fact there are now plastic baseball
cards and business cards that you can put in a CD player. CD business cards hold
about 2 MB of data before the size and shape of the card cuts off the spiral.
What the picture on the right does not even begin to impress upon you is how
incredibly small the data track is -- it is approximately 0.5 microns wide, with 1.6
microns separating one track from the next. (A micron is a millionth of a meter.) And
the bumps are even more miniscule..
How CDs Work

Understanding the CD: Bumps

The elongated bumps that make up the track are each 0.5 microns wide, a
minimum of 0.83 microns long and 125 nanometers high. (A nanometer is a billionth
of a meter.) Looking through the polycarbonate layer at the bumps, they look
something like this:
You will often read about "pits" on a CD instead of bumps. They appear as pits on
the aluminum side, but on the side the laser reads from, they are bumps.
The incredibly small dimensions of the bumps make the spiral track on a CD
extremely long. If you could lift the data track off a CD and stretch it out into a
straight line, it would be 0.5 microns wide and almost 3.5 miles (5 km) long!
To read something this small you need an incredibly precise disc-reading
mechanism. Let's take a look at that.
How CDs Work

Inside a CD player
CD Player Components

The CD player has the job of finding and reading the data stored as bumps on the
CD. Considering how small the bumps are, the CD player is an exceptionally precise
piece of equipment. The drive consists of three fundamental components:

A drive motor spins the disc. This drive motor is precisely controlled to
rotate between 200 and 500 rpm depending on which track is being read.

A laser and a lens system focus in on and read the bumps.

A tracking mechanism moves the laser assembly so that the laser's beam
can follow the spiral track. The tracking system has to be able to move the
laser at micron resolutions.

What the CD player Does: Laser Focus

Inside the CD player, there is a good bit of computer technology involved in forming the data into
understandable data blocks and sending them either to the DAC (in the case of an audio CD) or to the
computer (in the case of a CD-ROM drive).
The fundamental job of the CD player is to focus the laser on the track of bumps. The laser beam passes
through the polycarbonate layer, reflects off the aluminum layer and hits an opto-electronic device that
detects changes in light. The bumps reflect light differently than the "lands" (the rest of the aluminum
layer), and the opto-electronic sensor detects that change in reflectivity. The electronics in the drive
interpret the changes in reflectivity in order to read the bits that make up the bytes.
What the CD Player Does: Tracking
The hardest part is keeping the laser beam centered on the data track. This centering is the job of the
tracking system. The tracking system, as it plays the CD, has to continually move the laser outward. As
the laser moves outward from the center of the disc, the bumps move past the laser faster -- this happens
because the linear, or tangential, speed of the bumps is equal to the radius times the speed at which the
disc is revolving (rpm). Therefore, as the laser moves outward, the spindle motor must slow the speed of
the CD. That way, the bumps travel past the laser at a constant speed, and the data comes off the disc at
a constant rate
CD Encoding Issues
If you have a CD-R drive, and want to produce your own audio CDs or CD-ROMs, one of the great things
you've got going in your favor is the fact that software can handle all the details for you. You can say to
your software, "Please store these songs on this CD," or "Please store these data files on this CD-ROM,"
and the software will do the rest. Because of this, you don't need to know anything about CD data
formatting to create your own CDs. However, CD data formatting is complex and interesting, so let's go
into it anyway.
To understand how data are stored on a CD, you need to understand all of the different conditions the
designers of the data encoding methodology were trying to handle. Here is a fairly complete list:

Because the laser is tracking the spiral of data using the bumps, there cannot be extended gaps where
there are no bumps in the data track. To solve this problem, data is encoded using EFM (eight-fourteen
modulation). In EFM, 8-bit bytes are converted to 14 bits, and it is guaranteed by EFM that some of those
bits will be 1s.
Because the laser wants to be able to move between songs, data needs to be encoded into the music
telling the drive "where it is" on the disc. This problem is solved using what is known as sub code data.
Sub code data can encode the absolute and relative position of the laser in the track, and can also
encode such things as song titles.
Because the laser may misread a bump, there need to be error-correcting codes to handle single-bit
errors. To solve this problem, extra data bits are added that allow the drive to detect single-bit errors and
correct them.
Because a scratch or a speck on the CD might cause a whole packet of bytes to be misread (known as a
burst error), the drive needs to be able to recover from such an event. This problem is solved by actually
interleaving the data on the disc, so that it is stored non-sequentially around one of the disc's circuits.
The drive actually reads data one revolution at a time, and un-interleaves the data in order to play it.
If a few bytes are misread in music, the worst thing that can happen is a little fuzz during playback. When
data is stored on a CD, however, any data error is catastrophic. Therefore, additional error correction
codes are used when storing data on a CD-ROM.

CD Data Formats
There are several different formats used to store data on a CD, some widely used and some longforgotten. The two most common are CD-DA (audio) and CD-ROM (computer data).
For more information on CDs and related topics, check out the links on the next page.
How CD Burners Work

An external writable CD drive, also called a CD burner, lets you take music or data files from your
computer and make your own CDs.
The advent of CD burners marked a huge cultural shift. The technology made it feasible for the average
person to gather songs and make their own CDs. Suddenly, music-mix makers everywhere had their
hands on the means of production.

Today, writable CD drives (CD burners) are standard equipment in new PCs, and more and more audio
enthusiasts are adding separate CD burners to their stereo systems. In less than five years, CDs have
eclipsed tapes

as the mix medium of choice.

In this article, you'll find out how CD burners encode songs and other information onto blank discs. We'll
also look at CD re-writable technology, see how the data files are put together and find out how you can
make your own music mixes with a CD burner.

A CD has a long, spiraled data track. If you were to unwind this track, it would extend out 3.5 miles
(5 km).
CD Basics: The Bumps
If you've read How CDs Work, you understand the basic idea of CD technology. CDs store music and
other files in digital form -- that is, the information on the disc is represented by a series of 1s and 0s
(see How Analog and Digital Recording Works for more information). In conventional CDs, these 1s and
0s are represented by millions of tiny bumps and flat areas on the disc's reflective surface. The bumps
and flats are arranged in a continuous track that measures about 0.5 microns (millionths of a meter)
across and 3.5 miles (5 km) long.
To read this information, the CD player passes a laser beam over the track. When the laser passes over
a flat area in the track, the beam is reflected directly to an optical sensor on the laser assembly. The CD
player interprets this as a 1. When the beam passes over a bump, the light is bounced away from the
optical sensor. The CD player recognizes this as a 0.
A CD player guides a small laser along the CD's data track.
In conventional CDs, the flat areas, or lands, reflect the light back to the laser assembly; the
bumps deflect the light so it does not bounce back.
CD Basics: The Path
The bumps are arranged in a spiral path, starting at the center of the disc. The CD player spins the disc
while the laser assembly moves outward from the center of the CD. At a steady speed, the bumps move
past any point at the outer edge of the CD more rapidly than they move past any point nearer the CD's

center. In order to keep the bumps moving past the laser at a constant rate, the player must slow the
spinning speed of the disc as the laser assembly moves outward.
At its heart, this is all there is to a CD player. The execution of this idea is fairly complicated, because the
pattern of the spiral must be encoded and read with incredible precision, but the basic process is pretty
simple.
The CD player spins the disc while moving the laser assembly outward from the middle. To keep
the laser scanning the data track at a constant speed, the player must slow the disc as the
assembly moves outward.
In the next section, you'll find out how data is recorded on CDs, both by professional equipment and the
home CD burner.

The different layers of a conventional CD

Reading CDs
In the last section, we saw that conventional CDs store digital data as a pattern of bumps and flat areas,
arranged in a long spiral track. The CD fabrication machine uses a high-powered laser to etch the bump
pattern into photoresist material coated onto a glass plate. Through an elaborate imprinting process, this
pattern is pressed onto acrylic discs. The discs are then coated with aluminum (or another metal) to
create the readable reflective surface. Finally, the disc is coated with a transparent plastic
layer that protects the reflective metal from nicks, scratches and debris.
As you can see, this is a fairly complex, delicate operation, involving many steps and several different
materials. Like most complex manufacturing processes (from newspaper printing to television assembly),
conventional CD manufacturing isn't practical for home use. It's only feasible for manufacturers who
produce hundreds, thousands or millions of CD copies.
Consequently, conventional CDs have remained a "read only" storage medium for the average
consumer, like LPs or conventional DVDs. To audiophiles accustomed to recordable cassettes, as well as
computer users who were fed up with the limited memory capacity of floppy disks, this limitation seemed
like a major drawback of CD technology. In the early '90s, more and more consumers and professionals
were looking for a way to make their own CD-quality digital recordings.

Writing CDs
In response to this demand, electronics manufacturers introduced an alternative sort of CD that could be
encoded in a few easy steps. CD-recordable discs, or CD-Rs, don't have any bumps or flat areas at all.
Instead, they have a smooth reflective metal layer, which rests on top of a layer of photosensitive dye.
When the disc is blank, the dye is translucent: Light can shine through and reflect off the metal surface.
But when you heat the dye layer with concentrated light of a particular frequency and intensity, the dye
turns opaque: It darkens to the point that light can't pass through.
A CD-R doesn't have the same bumps and lands as a conventional CD. Instead, the disc has a dye
layer underneath a smooth, reflective surface. On a blank CD-R disc, the dye layer is completely
translucent, so all light reflects. The write laser darkens the spots where the bumps would be in a
conventional CD, forming non-reflecting areas.
By selectively darkening particular points along the CD track, and leaving other areas of dye translucent,
you can create a digital pattern that a standard CD player can read. The light from the player's laser beam
will only bounce back to the sensor when the dye is left translucent, in the same way that it will only
bounce back from the flat areas of a conventional CD. So, even though the CD-R disc doesn't have any
bumps pressed into it at all, it behaves just like a standard disc.
A CD burner's job, of course, is to "burn" the digital pattern onto a blank CD. In the next section, we'll look
inside a burner to see how it accomplishes this task.

The laser assembly inside a CD burner

Burning CDs: Laser Assembly
In the last section, we saw that CD burners darken microscopic areas of CD-R discs to record a digital
pattern of reflective and non-reflective areas that can be read by a standard CD player. Since the data

must be accurately encoded on such a small scale, the burning system must be extremely precise. Still,
the basic process at work is quite simple.
The CD burner has a moving laser assembly, just like an ordinary CD player. But in addition to the
standard "read laser," it has a "write laser." The write laser is more powerful than the read laser, so it
interacts with the disc differently: It alters the surface instead of just bouncing light off it. Read lasers are
not intense enough to darken the dye material, so simply playing a CD-R in a CD drive will not destroy
any encoded information.

The machinery in a CD burner looks pretty much the same as the machinery in any CD player.
There is a mechanism that spins the disc and another mechanism that slides the laser assembly.
Burning CDs: Write Laser
The write laser moves in exactly the same way as the read laser: It moves outward while the disc spins.
The bottom plastic layer has grooves pre-pressed into it, to guide the laser along the correct path. By
calibrating the rate of spin with the movement of the laser assembly, the burner keeps the laser running
along the track at a constant rate of speed. To record the data, the burner simply turns the laser writer on
and off in synch with the pattern of 1s and 0s. The laser darkens the material to encode a 0 and leaves
it translucent to encode a 1.
Most CD burners can create CDs at multiple speeds. At 1x speed, the CD spins at about the same rate as
it does when the player is reading it. This means it would take you about 60 minutes to record 60 minutes
of music. At 2x speed, it would take you about half an hour to record 60 minutes, and so on. For faster
burning speeds, you need more advanced laser-control systems and a faster connection between the
computer and the burner. You also need a blank disc that is designed to record information at this speed.
The main advantage of CD-R discs is that they work in almost all CD players and CD-ROMS, which are
among the most prevalent media players today. In addition to this wide compatibility, CD-Rs are
relatively inexpensive.

The main drawback of the format is that you can't reuse the discs. Once you've burned in the digital
pattern, it can't be erased and re-written. In the mid '90s, electronics manufacturers introduced a new CD
format that addressed this problem. In the next section, we'll look at these CD-rewritable discs,
commonly called CD-RWs, to see how they differ from standard CD-R discs.
Erasing CDs
In the last section, we looked at the most prevalent writable CD technology, CD-R. CD-R discs hold a lot
of data, work with most CD players and are fairly inexpensive. But unlike tapes, floppy disks and many
other data-storage mediums, you cannot re-record on CD-R disc once you've filled it up.
CD-RW discs have taken the idea of writable CDs a step further, building in an erase function so you
can record over old data you don't need anymore. These discs are based on phase-change technology.
In CD-RW discs, the phase-change element is a chemical compound of silver, antimony, tellurium and
indium. As with any physical material, you can change this compound's form by heating it to certain
temperatures. When the compound is heated above its melting temperature (around 600 degrees
Celsius), it becomes a liquid; at its crystallization temperature (around 200 degrees Celsius), it turns
into a solid.
In a CD-RW disc, the reflecting lands and non-reflecting bumps of a conventional CD are
represented by phase shifts in a special compound. When the compound is in a crystalline state,
it is translucent, so light can shine through to the metal layer above and reflect back to the laser
assembly. When the compound is melted into an amorphous state, it becomes opaque, making
the area non-reflective.
Phase-change Compounds
In phase-change compounds, these shifts in form can be "locked into place": They persist even after
the material cools down again. If you heat the compound in CD-RW discs to the melting temperature and
let it cool rapidly, it will remain in a fluid, amorphous state, even though it is below the crystallization
temperature. In order to crystallize the compound, you have to keep it at the crystallization temperature
for a certain length of time so that it turns into a solid before it cools down again.
In the compound used in CD-RW discs, the crystalline form is translucent while the amorphous fluid form
will absorb most light. On a new, blank CD, all of the material in the writable area is in the crystalline form,
so light will shine through this layer to the reflective metal above and bounce back to the light sensor. To
encode information on the disc, the CD burner uses its write laser, which is powerful enough to heat the
compound to its melting temperature. These "melted" spots serve the same purpose as the bumps on a
conventional CD and the opaque spots on a CD-R: They block the "read" laser so it won't reflect off the
metal layer. Each non-reflective area indicates a 0 in the digital code. Every spot that remains crystalline
is still reflective, indicating a 1.
The Erase Laser
As with CD-Rs, the read laser does not have enough power to change the state of the material in the
recording layer -- it's a lot weaker than the write laser. The erase laser falls somewhere in between: While
it isn't strong enough to melt the material, it does have the necessary intensity to heat the material to the

crystallization point. By holding the material at this temperature, the erase laser restores the compound to
its crystalline state, effectively erasing the encoded 0. This clears the disc so new data can be encoded.
CD-RW discs do not reflect as much light as older CD formats, so they cannot be read by most older CD
players and CD-ROM drives. Some newer drives and players, including all CD-RW writers, can adjust the
read laser to work with different CD formats. But since CD-RWs will not work on many CD players, these
are not a good choice for music CDs. For the most part, they are used as back-up storage devices for
computer files.
As we've seen, the reflective and non-reflective patterns on a CD are incredibly small, and they are
burned and read very quickly with a speeding laser beam. In this system, the chances of a data error are
fairly high. In the next section, we'll look at some of the ways that CD burners compensate for various
encoding problems.
CD Formats
In the previous sections, we looked at the basic idea of CD and CD-burner technology. Using precise
lasers or metal molds, you can mark a pattern of more-reflective areas and less-reflective areas that
represent a sequence of 1s and 0s. The system is so basic that you can encode just about any sort of
digital information. There is no inherent limitation on what kind of mark pattern you put down on the disc.
But in order to make the information accessible to another CD drive (or player), it has to be encoded in
an understandable form. The established form for music CDs, called ISO 9660, was the foundation for
later CD formats. This format was specifically designed to minimize the effect of data errors.
This is accomplished by carefully arranging the recorded data and mixing it with a lot of extra digital
information. On the next page, you'll learn about the extra information encoded on a burned CD
Encoding Data
There are a number of important aspects involved in making a CD readable to a CD player:
The CD track is marked with a sort of time code, which tells the CD player what part of the disc it is
reading at any particular time. Discs are also encoded with a table of contents, located at the beginning
of the track (the center of the disc), which tells the player where particular songs (or files) are written onto
the disc.
The data track is broken up by extra filler, so there are no long strings of 1s or 0s. Without frequent shifts
from 1 to 0, there would be large sections without a changing pattern of reflectivity. This could cause the
read laser to "lose its place" on the disc. The filler data breaks up these large sections.
Extra data bits are included to help the player recognize and fix a mistake. If the read laser misreads a
single bit, the player is able to correct the problem using the additional encoded data.
Recorded information is not encoded sequentially; it is interlaced in a set pattern. This reduces the risk of
losing whole sections of data. If a scratch or piece of debris makes a part of the track unreadable, it will
damage separate bits of data from different parts of the song or file, instead of eliminating an entire

segment of information. Since only small pieces of each file segment are unreadable, it's easier for the
CD player to correct the problem or recover from it.
The actual arrangement of information on music CDs is incredibly complex. And CD-ROMS -- compact
discs that contain computer files rather than song tracks -- have even more extensive error-correction
systems. This is because an error in a computer file could corrupt an entire program, while a small
uncorrected error on a music CD only means a bit of fuzz or a skipping noise. If you are interested in the
various ways that data is arranged on different types of CDs, check out Audio Compact Disc - Writing and
Reading the Data.
With some writable CD formats, you have to prepare all of the information before you begin burning. This
limitation is built into the original format of CDs as well as the physical design of the disc itself. After all,
the long track forms one continuous, connected string of 1s and 0s, and it's difficult to break this up into
separate sections. With newer disc formats, you can record files one "packet" at a time, adding the table
of contents and other unifying structures once you've filled up the disc.
CD burners are an amazing piece of technology, and the inner workings are certainly fascinating. But to
the typical computer user, the most compelling aspect of burners is what you can do with them. In the
next section, we'll find out how you can put all of this technology to work and make your own music mix.
Creating Your Own CDs: Software
While CD-Rs can store all sorts of digital information, the most widespread application these days is
making music-mix CDs with a computer. If you're new to the world of CD burners, this can seem like a
daunting task. But it's actually very simple, once you have the right software and know the general
procedure.
If you have already hooked up your CD burner, the first step in making a CD is loading the software you
need. This music-management software serves several functions:

It converts songs to the correct format for burning.

It allows you to arrange the songs for your mix.

It controls the encoding process for writing to the CD.

These days, most burners are packaged with one or more music programs, but you can also buy
programs or download them over the Internet. You may need separate media applications to handle
different elements in the process, but there are some good programs that handle everything (see
below). Click hereto do a search for software related to burning your own CDs.
Creating Your Own CDs: Music
When you have all of the software you need, it's time to gather some songs. You may want to take songs
directly from your CD collection. To do this, you need to "rip" the songs -- copy them from your CD to your
computer's hard drive. You'll need an extraction program to do this. To copy a particular track, insert the
CD into your built-in CD-ROM drive (or the CD-burner itself) and select the song you want through the

extraction program. Essentially, the program will play the song and re-record it into a usable data format.
It's legal to make copies of songs you own, as long as the CD is only for your personal use.
You can also gather MP3s over the Internet. You can download MP3s from pay-for-music sites or with filesharing programs. Some MP3s are free, and can be legally downloaded and copied onto a CD. Most are
illegal copies, however, and it is a copyright violation to download them and burn them onto a CD. To
search for MP3-related Web sites, click here.
MP3s are compressed files, and you must expand (decode) them in order to burn them onto a CD.
Standard music-management programs can decode these files. If you don't have the right software, there
are a number of decoding programs that you can download over the Internet.
Once you've gathered the songs, you can use your music manager to arrange them in the order you
want. Keep in mind that you have a limited amount of disc space to work with. CD-Rs have
varying capacities, measured in both megabytes and minutes. These days, most CD-Rs are either 74
minutes or 80 minutes long. Before you move on to burning your CD, you should make sure that your mix
isn't too long for the blank disc.
Creating Your Own CDs: Burning
Once the mix is complete and you have saved it, all you need to do is insert a blank CD-R disc into the
burner and choose the "burn" or "write" option in your music-management software. Be sure to select
"music CD" rather than "data CD," or you won't be able to play the disc on ordinary CD players. You'll
also need to choose the speed at which you want to burn the disc. Typically, a slower speed reduces the
chance of a major error during the writing process.
A lot of things can go wrong when you're burning a CD, so don't be surprised if some of them don't come
out right. Since CD-Rs can not be overwritten, any irreversible mistake means you'll have to junk the
whole disc. Among the CD-burning set, this is called "making a coaster," as that's pretty much all you
can do with the damaged CD.
If you continually have problems burning CDs, your drive may be defective or your music-management
program may be faulty. Before you return your burner, try out some other programs and see if they yield
better results.
To make a CD-ROM, you'll go through a similar process -- but you'll code the disc as a data CD, not a
music CD. Some newer CD players and DVD players can read un translated MP3 data files, and you may
be able to make CD-ROM music mixes this way. Since MP3s are compressed files, you can fit a lot more
of them on a single disc, which means you can make a longer mix. The drawback, of course, is that your
disc won't work in the vast majority of CD players.
CD burners have opened up a whole new world to the average computer user. You can record music that
will run in most anybody's CD player, or you can put together CD-ROMs containing photos, Web pages or
movies. With a piece of equipment about the size of a car stereo, and about the price of a cheap bicycle,
you can set up your own multimedia production company!
How DVDs Work

It wasn't really that long ago that VHS tapes dominated the home video market, but now, DVDs have all
but wiped them out completely. Going from tape to disc gave the home theater experience a major
upgrade, and ushered in an era of feature-packed special edition home video.
In this article, you will learn what a DVD is made of, how a DVD player reads a disc, a little DVD history
and much more.
DVD Discs
A DVD is very similar to a CD, but it has a much larger data capacity. A standard DVD holds about
seven times more data than a CD does. This huge capacity means that a DVD has enough room to store
a full-length, MPEG-2-encoded movie, as well as a lot of other information.
Here are the typical contents of a DVD movie:

Up to 133 minutes of high-resolution video, in letterbox or pan-and-scan format, with 720 dots of
horizontal resolution (The video compression ratio is typically 40:1 using MPEG-2 compression.)

Soundtrack presented in up to eight languages using 5.1 channel Dolby digital surround sound

Subtitles in up to 32 languages

DVD can also be used to store almost eight hours of CD-quality music per side.
The format offers many advantages over VHS tapes:

DVD picture quality is better, and many DVDs have Dolby Digital or DTS sound, which is much
closer to the sound you experience in a movie theater.

Many DVD movies have an on-screen index, where the creator of the DVD has labeled many of
the significant parts of the movie, sometimes with a picture. With your remote, if you select the
part of the movie you want to view, the DVD player will take you right to that part, with no need to
rewind or fast-forward.

DVD players are compatible with audio CDs.

Some DVD movies have both the letterbox format, which fits wide-screen TVs, and the standard
TV size format, so you can choose which way you want to watch the movie.

DVD movies may have several soundtracks on them, and they may provide subtitles in different
languages. Foreign movies may give you the choice between the version dubbed into your
language, or the original soundtrack with subtitles in your language.

DVD formats

DVD Layers

DVDs are of the same diameter and thickness as CDs, and they are made using some of the
same materials and manufacturing methods. Like a CD, the data on a DVD is encoded in the
form of small pits and bumps in the track of the disc.

A DVD is composed of several layers of plastic, totaling about 1.2 millimeters thick. Each layer is
created by injection molding polycarbonate plastic. This process forms a disc that has
microscopic bumps arranged as a single, continuous and extremely long spiral track of data.
More on the bumps later.

Once the clear pieces of polycarbonate are formed, a thin reflective layer is sputtered onto the
disc, covering the bumps. Aluminum is used behind the inner layers, but a semi-reflective gold
layer is used for the outer layers, allowing the laser to focus through the outer and onto the inner
layers. After all of the layers are made, each one is coated with lacquer, squeezed together and
cured under infrared light. For single-sided discs, the label is silk-screened onto the nonreadable
side. Double-sided discs are printed only on the nonreadable area near the hole in the middle.
Cross sections of the various types of completed DVDs (not to scale) look like this:

Data tracks on a DVD

HowStuffWorks.com

Each writable layer of a DVD has a spiral track of data. On single-layer DVDs, the track always
circles from the inside of the disc to the outside. That the spiral track starts at the center means
that a single-layer DVD can be smaller than 12 centimeters if desired.

What the image to the left cannot impress upon you is how incredibly tiny the data track is -- just
740 nanometers separate one track from the next (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter). And the
elongated bumps that make up the track are each 320 nanometers wide, a minimum of 400
nanometers long and 120 nanometers high. The following figure illustrates looking through the
polycarbonate layer at the bumps.

You will often read about "pits" on a DVD instead of bumps. They appear as pits on the aluminum
side, but on the side that the laser reads from, they are bumps.

DVD pit layout

HowStuffWorks.com

The microscopic dimensions of the bumps make the spiral track on a DVD extremely long. If you
could lift the data track off a single layer of a DVD, and stretch it out into a straight line, it would
be almost 7.5 miles long! That means that a double-sided, double-layer DVD would have 30
miles (48 km) of data!

To read bumps this small you need an incredibly precise disc-reading mechanism.

DVD Storage Capacity

DVDs can store more data than CDs for a few reasons:

Higher-density data storage

Less overhead, more area

Multi-layer storage

Higher Density Data Storage

Single-sided, single-layer DVDs can store about seven times more data than CDs. A large part of this
increase comes from the pits and tracks being smaller on DVDs.
Track Pitch

CD = 1600 nanometers

DVD = 740 nanometers

Minimum Pit Length (single-layer DVD)

CD = 830 nanometers

DVD = 400 nanometers

Minimum Pit Length (double-layer DVD)

CD = 830 nanometers

DVD = 440 nanometers

Let's try to get an idea of how much more data can be stored due to the physically tighter spacing of pits
on a DVD. The track pitch on a DVD is 2.16 times smaller, and the minimum pit length for a single-layer
DVD is 2.08 times smaller than on a CD. By multiplying these two numbers, we find that there is room for
about 4.5 times as many pits on a DVD. So where does the rest of the increase come from?
Less Overhead, More Area
On a CD, there is a lot of extra information encoded on the disc to allow for error correction -- this
information is really just a repetition of information that is already on the disc. The error correction scheme
that a CD uses is quite old and inefficient compared to the method used on DVDs. The DVD format
doesn't waste as much space on error correction, enabling it to store much more real information. Another
way that DVDs achieve higher capacity is by encoding data onto a slightly larger area of the disc than is
done on a CD.
Multi-Layer Storage
To increase the storage capacity even more, a DVD can have up to four layers, two on each side. The
laser that reads the disc can actually focus on the second layer through the first layer. Here is a list of the
capacities of different forms of DVDs:
Single-sided/Single-layer

4.38 GB

2 hours movie time

Single-sided/Double-layer

7.95 GB

4 hours movie time

Double-sided/Single-layer

8.75 GB

4.5 hours movie time

Double-sided/Double-layer

15.9 GB

Over 8 hours movie time

You may be wondering why the capacity of a DVD doesn't double when you add a whole second layer to
the disc. This is because when a disc is made with two layers, the pits have to be a little longer, on both
layers, than when a single layer is used. This helps to avoid interference between the layers, which would
cause errors when the disc is played.
DVD Video
Even though its storage capacity is huge, the uncompressed video data of a full-length movie would never
fit on a DVD. In order to fit a movie on a DVD, you need video compression. A group called the Moving
Picture Experts Group (MPEG) establishes the standards for compressing moving pictures.
When movies are put onto DVDs, they are encoded in MPEG-2 format and then stored on the disc. This
compression format is a widely accepted international standard. Your DVD player contains an MPEG-2
decoder, which can uncompress this data as quickly as you can watch it.
The MPEG-2 Format and Data Size Reduction
A movie is usually filmed at a rate of 24 frames per second. This means that every second, there are 24
complete images displayed on the movie screen. American and Japanese television use a format called
NTSC, which displays a total of 30 frames per second; but it does this in a sequence of 60 fields, each of
which contains alternating lines of the picture. Other countries use PAL format, which displays at 50 fields
per second, but at a higher resolution (see How Video Formatting Works for details on these formats).
Because of the differences in frame rate and resolution, an MPEG movie needs to be formatted for either
the NTSC or the PAL system.
The MPEG encoder that creates the compressed movie file analyzes each frame and decides how to
encode it. The compression uses some of the same technology as still image compression does to
eliminate redundant or irrelevant data. It also uses information from other frames to reduce the overall
size of the file. Each frame can be encoded in one of three ways:

As an intraframe - An intraframe contains the complete image data for that frame. This method of
encoding provides the least compression.

As a predicted frame - A predicted frame contains just enough information to tell the DVD player
how to display the frame based on the most recently displayed intraframe or predicted frame.
This means that the frame contains only the data that relates to how the picture has changed
from the previous frame.

As a bidirectional frame - In order to display this type of frame, the player must have the
information from the surrounding intraframe or predicted frames. Using data from the closest
surrounding frames, it uses interpolation (something like averaging) to calculate the position and
color of each pixel.

Depending on the type of scene being converted, the encoder will decide which types of frames to use. If
a newscast were being converted, a lot more predicted frames could be used, because most of the scene
is unaltered from one frame to the next. On the other hand, if a very fast action scene were being
converted, in which things changed very quickly from one frame to the next, more intraframes would have
to be encoded. The newscast would compress to a much smaller size than the action sequence.

If all of this sounds complicated, then you are starting to get a feeling for how much work your DVD player
does to decode an MPEG-2 movie. A lot of processing power is required; even some computers with DVD
players can't keep up with the processing required to play a DVD movie.

Comparison of a raw audio signal to the CD audio and DVD audio output
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DVD Audio
DVD audio and DVD video are different formats. DVD audio discs and players are relatively rare right
now, but they will become more common, and the difference in sound quality should be noticeable. In
order to take advantage of higher-quality DVD audio discs, you will need a DVD player with a 192kHz/24bit digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Most DVD players have only a 96kHz/24-bit digital-to-analog
converter. So if you want to be able to listen to DVD audio discs, be sure to look for a DVD audio player
with a 192kHz/24-bit digital-to-analog converter.
DVD audio recordings can provide far better sound quality than CDs. The chart below lists the sampling
rate and accuracy for CD recordings and the maximum sampling rate and accuracy for DVD recordings.
CDs can hold 74 minutes of music. DVD audio discs can hold 74 minutes of music at their highest quality
level, 192kHz/24-bit audio. By lowering either the sampling rate or the accuracy, DVDs can be made to
hold more music. A DVD audio disc can store up to two hours of 6-channel, better than CD quality,
96kHz/24-bit music. Lower the specifications further, and a DVD audio disc can hold almost seven hours
of CD-quality audio.
Sampling Rate

CD Audio = 441. kHz

DVD Audio = 192 kHz

Samples Per Second

CD Audio = 44,100

DVD Audio = 192,000

Sampling Accuracy

CD Audio = 16-bit

DVD Audio = 24.bit

Number of Possible Output Levels

CD Audio = 65,536

DVD Audio = 16,777,216

In an audio CD or DVD, each bit represents a digital command telling the DAC what voltage level to
output (see How Analog and Digital Recording Works for details). While an ideal recording would follow
the raw waveform exactly, digital recordings sample the sound at different frequencies, and therefore lose
some of the data.
The graph above shows how the highest quality DVD audio compares to CD audio. You can see that DVD
follows the signal more closely, but it's still a long way from perfect.
To get the full experience of the Dolby Digital sound used on many DVDs, you need a home
theatersystem with five speakers, a subwoofer, and a receiver that is either "Dolby Digital ready" or has a
built-in Dolby Digital decoder.
If your receiver is Dolby Digital ready, then it does not have a Dolby Digital decoder, so you need to buy
a DVD player with its own Dolby Digital decoder and 5.1 channel outputs. If you also want your system to
be compatible with DTS sound, then your DVD player will need a DTS decoder, too.
If your receiver has its own Dolby Digital decoder and DTS decoder, then you don't need a DVD player
with 5.1 channel outputs, and you can save some money on cables by using the digital outputs.
DID YOU KNOW?
Some DVDs carry commentary tracks, in which the filmmaker talks about the movie while it is running.
This can be very exciting for true film buffs. DVDs can also contain extra, previously unreleased scenes.
And a DVD is sometimes a director's cut -- the film as the director originally intended it.
DVDs and Laser Discs
Laser disc is an older technology. It offered a better picture and better sound than videotapes, and it is
comparable to DVD. But the laser disc format is analog; DVDs are digital (see How Analog and Digital
Recording Works). Laser discs are only used for prerecorded movies, and they are larger, about 12

inches (30.5 centimeters) in diameter, instead the 5-inch (12.7-centimeter) diameter of DVDs. The two
formats usually can't be played on the same machine.
Laser discs, like DVDs, allow viewers to go to the exact scene they wish to see, and to freeze a frame or
slow the picture. Laser discs can only hold an hour on each side, so you have to flip the disc to watch the
second half of the movie.
Because of DVD compression techniques, DVDs can hold more data. You rarely have to flip a DVD to
watch a whole movie. Laser disc players are noisier than DVD players, and they can sometimes suffer
"laser rot" -- the aluminum side of the disc oxidizes, and the quality of the disc deteriorates. DVDs are less
likely to have this problem, because manufacturing techniques have improved. As the popularity of DVD
grows, laser discs are becoming harder to find.
DVD FAQ
What does "DVD" stand for?
"DVD" stands for digital versatile disc, but some sources declare that it doesn't stand for anything
anymore.
Can I record television shows or movies on a DVD player?
Yes, you can -- if your DVD player is also a DVD recorder.
Can I play CDs on a DVD player?
Yes. DVD players are completely compatible with audio compact discs. And music will become
increasingly available in DVD format. See What is the difference between DVD-audio and CDs? for more
discussion of the DVD audio format.
What is the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R?
DVD+ ("plus") and DVD- ("dash") are two competing DVD formats. You may remember the "war" between
the Betamax and VHS formats for domination of the VCR market. The big difference with DVD+R vs.
DVD-R is that there are hybrid (dual-format) drives capable of reading both types. Many companies have
taken sides -- the DVD Forum is a group of manufacturers that support DVD-R, while the DVD+RW
Alliancesupports that format. Consumers have yet to make either format the winner.
What are region codes?
Movie studios use region codes on DVDs to thwart unauthorized copying, and to control the release dates
of DVD movies. The actual region code is stored in one byte on the DVD. The DVD player or drive has a
region code in its firmware. Personal computer DVD-ROM players often have the code in the software or
in the MPEG-2 decoder.
For the player or drive to play the movie, the two codes must match. The code is also printed on the back
of a DVD package, superimposed on a small image of the globe. If you have a DVD that was made for
release in Asia, you won't be able to play it on a DVD player intended for use in Australia.