DVD-Video or DV vs MPEG-2

What DV format is good for? What MPEG-2 format is good for? And what is DVD-Video? Read the article to get the answers on these questions!

13 GB per hour...

This is very precise estimation of how much data you should allocate on a hard drive to store just one hour of DV video captured from a digital camcorder. Too often the one can heard that DV material requires so much space because it stores video material in the original quality. This is very common mistake just because DV format is using lossy compression algorithm. Lossy means that the original image quality is lost during compression. Not going depth into math it is possible to say that compression algorithm used in DV format is very similar to the one used for image compression in JPEG format.

What DV format is good for?

Very important feature of DV format is that each frame is compressed separately from other frames. And because of this, having video material in DV format it is very easy to gain access to a particular frame without extracting neighborhood frames. This feature of DV format makes it perfect for video editing. However DV format is completely unacceptable for archival purposes. Although MiniDV tapes are small and compact, they are completely unhandy when you want to playback the video on a TV. And let's not forget about the price of MiniDV tape - its price much higher comparing to other widely available media. And this is the point where MPEG-2 format come to stage.

What MPEG-2 format is good for?

This format also uses compression algorithm similar to one used in DV, however it is much smarter. MPEG-2 format uses video information found in a first frame to compress second frame. Thus, instead of compressing whole second frame the difference between first and second frames is compressed only. And this is exactly the reason why it is very hard to do video editing of footage compressed with MPEG-2 format. However, in return, MPEG-2 can compress raw video for DVD-Video with a factor of 1:20 with little or no loss in perceived quality. That is exactly the reason MPEG-2 was accepted worldwide as a prefect format for video archival purposes.

What is DVD-Video then?

So far we showed that MPEG-2 is a very good format for video material archiving. So it seems that everything is cool - just write video files to the DVD media in the MPEG-2 format and you are ready to play them back whenever you wish. Well, whoever has had a chance to use VHS player knows how it is hard to find necessary position on a video tape. Thus it was decided to put video material into "intellectual" container and the name for this container is DVD-Video. In other words DVD-Video is a container for video material stored in MPEG-2 format with extra features. Among those features is an interactive DVD menu which almost every DVD-Video disc has. Using interactive DVD menu it is possible to start playing video clip from the predefined position so there is no more need to rewind it back and forth to find that position.

Soon or later every person whose shelf has no more space for one additional MiniDV tape decide that now it is time to mange all the video archive in some other way. If this is your case then you are at the right place of digital universe. We are developing an application called CrystalMotion DVDwithMenu which can create DVD-Video disc with a nice interactive DVD menu for you. This program is very simple in usage so you will not spend too much time learning how to create DVD-Video disc with it. Just give it a try!