Battle of the DVD Standards

DVD burners are here to stay and we can reasonably expect them to supersede CD-burners in PCs before long. After all, a DVD can hold 4.7 GBytes yes that’s seven times the amount of data you can cram on a CDROM. About 10 manufacturers are shipping models already, with prices coming down quickly from the £300 mark. There’s one niggling problem, though: some bickering has arisen over a common standard to be adopted.During the past two years or so, the DVD has become popular as a replacement for the prerecorded VHS tape. A glut of popular films and concerts is currently available on DVD from the high street stores offering superb image and (surround-) sound quality. This has become possible thanks to the DVD’s huge storage capacity of 4.7 Gigabytes per layer.