DVD: What Does It Mean for Education?
Sandra Benedetto · T.H.E. Journal Technological Horizons in Education · 1998
DVD is a major step forward in optical disc technology. It can address technology needs that neither Laser Disc nor CD-ROM alone could fully meet. The latest buzz-word in disc technology these days is DVD. DVD technology was announced in 1995. As with most new technologies, it was introduced amidst a flurry of excitement and promises about what it would hold for the future of communication. DVD was going to revolutionize the multimedia industry. It is true: DVD is a major step forward in optical disc technology. It can address technology needs that neither Laser Disc nor CD-ROM alone could fully meet. Now that DVD movie discs and home entertainment DVD players have reached mainstream consumers and the initial media hype about the technology has subsided, we can begin to examine its benefits for teaching and learning. DVD offers the ability to combine the best of Laser Disc and CD-ROM programs, creating a multimedia platform that can deliver high-quality, full-motion video and an on-screen user interface for interactive navigation and branching. With these features, educators can use either a DVD-Video player or DVD-ROM computer system as tools for providing whole group and individual instruction. What exactly is DVD? Originally, DVD was an abbreviation for Video However, many data formats (not only video) can be stored on a DVD disc, so some folks started calling it Versatile The Digital Versatile Disc name didn't take hold and a fair amount of confusion ensued from the use of two names to describe the same entity. Now, most people simply refer to DVD as DVD. A DVD disc is often compared to a compact disc because it has the same physical size and appearance. However, that's where the similarities end. A DVD disc can hold two sides of information on the same disc, and each side can contain two layers of data. A single-sided DVD disc holds up to 4.7 GB of information; a single-sided disc with two layers can hold up to 8.5 GB. The same holds true for the second side, resulting in a 17.0 GB total capacity on one disc. According to the DVD Forum, there are five specified DVD disc formats. They are DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RAM and DVD-Audio. The two most important DVD formats for education are DVD-Video and DVD-ROM because these are the types of discs that will be created by publishers to deliver educational content to schools, universities and libraries. The format of the disc describes how information is stored on the disc and which type of hardware system must be used to play the disc. A familiar analogy is in the comparison of CD-Audio and CD-ROM discs; both utilize the same type of physical disc but each contains different data formats and is played back on different types of hardware systems. Following are the DVD formats and their applications: DVD-Video, interactive or linear video programs; DVD-ROM, multimedia programs or data storage requiring a computer; DVD-R, record-once format used in developing DVD-Video or DVD-ROM programs; DVD-RAM, re-recordable format used as a computer peripheral to store files; and DVD-Audio, audio-only format. This article deals with the DVD-Video format and its potential use for education. The DVD-Video format allows developers of video-rich, educational material to create highly interactive multimedia programs. Like Laser Disc, DVD-Video allows the user to quickly search to and play back specific segments in the video program. Yet DVD-Video offers many more capabilities which are ideal for classroom use. A single-sided, single-layered DVD-Video disc can hold over 2 hours of high-quality, digital video, opposed to the 30 minutes of analog video on a CAV Laser Disc or 60 minutes on a CLV Laser Disc. The exact amount of video that can be stored on a DVD disc depends on the level of MPEG2 compression applied when encoding the video as digital data. However, a good rule of thumb is 2 hours of video to maintain a high-quality picture. …