DVD

Stands for "Digital Versatile Disc." If you hear people refer to DVDs as digital video discs, tell them they used to be right, but now, with the mulitple uses of DVDs, the correct term is "digital versatile disk." Yep, the technology naming people just love to confuse us... A DVD is a high-capacity optical disc that looks like a CD, but can store much more information. While a CD can store 650 MB of data, a single-layer, single-sided DVD can store 4.7GB of data. This allows for massive computer applications and full-length movies to be stored on a single DVD. Even more amazing are the other options available with DVD: There is a two-layer standard that doubles the single-sided capacity to 8.5GB. The disks can also be double-sided, ramping up the maximum storage on a single disc to 17GB. That's 26 times more data than a CD can hold! However, to be able to read DVDs in your computer you'll need a DVD-ROM drive. Fortunately, DVDs can also read your CDs, but to play DVD movies on your computer, you'll need to have a graphics card with a DVD-decoder.