DVD+RW

A spindle with discs of the DVD+RW format

Optical discs

Optical disc Optical disc drive Optical disc authoring Authoring software Recording technologies Recording modes Packet writing
Optical media types
Blu-ray Disc (BD): BD-R, BD-RE DVD: DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-R DL, DVD+R DL, DVD-R DS, DVD+R DS, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, DVD-D, DVD-A, HVD, EcoDisc Compact Disc (CD): Red Book, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, 5.1 Music Disc, SACD, Photo CD, CD Video (CDV), Video CD (VCD), SVCD, CD+G, CD-Text, CD-ROM XA, CD-i Universal Media Disc (UMD) Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) Forward Versatile Disc (FVD) Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) China Blue High-definition Disc (CBHD) HD DVD: HD DVD-R, HD DVD-RW, HD DVD-RAM High definition Versatile Multilayer Disc (HD VMD) VCDHD GD-ROM MiniDisc (MD) (Hi-MD) Laserdisc (LD) (LD-ROM) Video Single Disc (VSD) Ultra Density Optical (UDO) Stacked Volumetric Optical Disk (SVOD) Five dimensional disc (5D DVD) Nintendo optical disc (NOD)
Standards
SFF ATAPI/MMC Mount Rainier (packet writing) Mount Fuji (layer jump recording) Rainbow Books File systems ISO 9660 Joliet Rock Ridge / SUSP El Torito Apple ISO 9660 Extensions Universal Disk Format (UDF) ISO 13490
See also
History of optical storage media High definition optical disc format war
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DVD+RW is a physical format for rewritable DVDs and can hold up to 4.7 GB. DVD+RW was created by the DVD+RW Alliance, an industry consortium of drive and disc manufacturers. Additionally, DVD+RW supports a method of writing called "lossless linking", which makes it suitable for random access and improves compatibility with DVD players.^[1]

DVD+RW must be formatted before recording by a DVD recorder.

The rewritable DVD+RW standard was formalized earlier than the non-rewritable DVD+R (the opposite was true with the DVD- formats). Although credit for developing the standard is often attributed unilaterally to Philips, it was "finalized" in 1997 by the DVD+RW Alliance. It was then abandoned until 2001, when it was heavily revised (in particular, the capacity increased from 2.8 GB to 4.7GB).^{[citation needed]}

Technical details

The recording layer in DVD+RW and DVD-RW discs is a phase change metal alloy (often GeSbTe) whose crystalline phase and amorphous phase have different reflectivity. The states can be switched depending on the power of the writing laser, so data can be written, read, erased and re-written. DVD-R and DVD+R discs use an organic dye.

The capacity of a single-layer disc is approximated as 4.7 × 10⁹ bytes. In actuality, the disc is laid out with 2295104 sectors of 2048 bytes each which comes to 4,700,372,992 bytes, 4,590,208 kibibytes (KiB, binary kilobytes), 4482.625 mebibytes (MiB, binary megabytes), or 4.377563476 gibibytes (GiB, binary gigabytes).

Dual layer

A dual-layer DVD+RW specification was approved in March 2006 with a capacity of 8.5 GB.^[2] However, manufacturing support for rewritable dual-layer discs did not materialize due to costs and expected competition from newer formats like Blu-ray and HD DVD, which boasted up to 25 GB on a single layer.

See also

• Book type
• MultiLevel Recording

References

1. ^ http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dvd-burner-test,586-2.html
2. ^ DVD+RW part 2: Dual Layer, volume 1; DVD+RW 8.5 Gbytes, Basic Format Specifications, version 1.0, March 2006

Further reading

• ISO/IEC 17341:2009, Data interchange on 120 mm and 80 mm optical disk using +RW format -- Capacity: 4,7 Gbytes and 1,46 Gbytes per side (recording speed up to 4X)
• ISO/IEC 26925:2009, Data interchange on 120 mm and 80 mm optical disk using +RW HS format -- Capacity: 4,7 Gbytes and 1,46 Gbytes per side (recording speed 8X)
• ISO/IEC 29642:2009, Data interchange on 120 mm and 80 mm optical disk using +RW DL format -- Capacity: 8,55 Gbytes and 2,66 Gbytes per side (recording speed 2,4X)

External links

• Understanding Recordable & Rewritable DVD by Hugh Bennett
• Why DVD+R(W) is superior to DVD-R(W)