Customer Reviews

Dvd Demystified: The Guidebook for Dvd-Video and Dvd-Rom

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Jim Taylor does a great job of describing not only the history of the DVD format, but the technical details as well. Anyone ever slightly interested in this great format should get this book. It's a DVD bible and it even comes with an actual DVD Disc! The disc contains Dolby Digital and THX trailers, as well as test patterns and DVD movie previews.

I would recommend this book to anyone with or planning on buying DVD. The chapters are divided up well so it's easy to skip over the too-technical items. Now I can finally know what I'm talking about when arguing about DVD with friends :)

An excellent book for the audio/videophile or professional. Every detail appears to be covered. An excellent value even at twice the price.

"Storage media may have come and gone, but the 'killer' technology has finally arrived: DVD (Digital Video Disk). Its 4.7 gigabytes of storage per disk (CD offers 650) make it the imminent successor to (etc.)" This quote from the Book Description (not the book itself) of "DVD Demystified" has obviously left out the word "megabytes" after the figure "650", but anybody conscientiously looking into buying this book can figure that out. This is "the" book on the subject, and deserves 5 stars across the board!

This book is great! BUT there is an error in the THX "Tex" trailer, they have flipped the back channels (!), I hope they have fixed it in the new version...

650Mb or maybe more is just the theoretical space that a CD can provide. Trying to cram too much data can result in unreliable storage on the outer regions of the CD. Drive control mechanisms find it hard to align the lens on the outer tracks of a rotating CD as the linear velocity is at maximum there. Other than that, the outer regions are more likely to get damaged. So here's a tip; don't store bit-critical data beyond 640Mb.

Basically what I said in the line above. The book is great, and if you have ever read anything on cd storage, or even looked at a recordable cd case, then you know a cd hold 650MB of data.

The guy from Portland, OR who gave this book 1 star is a dork and shouldn't be doing anything other than getting a life.

I believe that the gentleperson from Portland was trying to point out, correctly, that the syntax of the sentence re 4.7 GB of DVD space was actually compared with 650 GB of CD-ROM space. Now, all we know-it-alls automatically translated the 650 into MB's, but what was actually printed on the page read 650 GB's. I.E., everyone wins and all must receive prizes. For the know-nothing reader, s/he might, just might, be misled and confused into thinking that a CD-ROM contained 650 GB of space, thus making the sentence and point senseless. Do recognize that everyone who chooses to be in this field must, almost by definition, contains a little flavor of obsessive compulsive personality disorder. The gentleperson from Portland was showing his/her. Those who objected were also placing theirs on display. Why not just forget the whole thing.

"Storage media may have come and gone, but the 'killer' technology has finally arrived: DVD (Digital Video Disk). Its 4.7 gigabytes of storage per disk (CD offers 650)"

If this is an accurate quote from the book, it does not speak well of the accuracy of the technical aspects of the book. A CD has 640MB of storage vs 4.7GB for the DVD. Quite a difference.