Optical Discs

Revision as of 23:00, 10 March 2014

An optical disc is read by a laser. They have been used extensively to store and distribute music, movies, and computer programs and data. CD drives became commonplace in personal computers in the mid-1990s, and burners to create CD-ROMs on personal computers were common by the early 2000s. Later, the higher-capacity DVD format became common both for reading and writing as well, and the even newer BluRay format won a "format war" against rival HD-DVD to get some popularity at present, though physical formats in general are on the wane as a distribution format due to the widespread deployment of the high-bandwidth Internet.

• BluRay Disc
  • M-Disc
• CD (Compact Disc)
  • CD-DA (Compact Disc Digital Audio or Red Book)
  • CD-MIDI
  • CD-ROM (Yellow Book)
  • DD-CD (Double-density Compact Disc)
  • Enhanced CD
  • Photo CD (Beige Book)
    • CD-i (Green Book)
  • SACD (Super Audio CD or Scarlet Book)
  • VCD (Video CD or White Book)
    • Super Video CD
• DVD
  • DVD-Audio
  • DVD-ROM
  • M-Disc
• Enhanced Versatile Disc
• GD-ROM
• HD-DVD
  • China Blue High-Definition Disc
• Laserdisc
• Nintendo optical discs
  • Nintendo GameCube Game Disc
  • Nintendo Wii Optical Disc
  • Nintendo Wii U Optical Disc
• Thomson-CSF system
• Ultra Density Optical
• Universal Media Disc

Links

• Optical media longevity
• "Archival Disc" standard formulated for professional-use next-generation optical discs (up to 1 TB capacity)