DVD Players

A DVD player plays Digital Video Disks, DVD-Audio discs and CD audio. They also will commonly support other formats, such as SACD, MP3, or Picture CD. DVD is a video standard for playing back digital video in the home. It has been superseded by Blu-ray as the new high quality video format, as DVDs are not capable of playing back HD video.

Products

Like a CD player, a DVD player has two main parts: the transport, which spins the disc and reads the digital data off, and the decoding circuitry, which transforms the digital data back into analogue audio and video signals that can be amplified and displayed, respectively. Other parts of the player deal with error correction and control. The digital data from a movie soundtrack is usually passed out of the player in its digital form, where it is decoded back out into seperate audio signals by a home theatre receiver. Newer DVD players will also feature an HDMI connection, and many will upscale a standard definition (576i) DVD picture to a higher resolution. DVD players are region-coded to play only discs released in the region of sale, although this can usually be bypassed. A modified form of this technology has been carried forward to Blu-ray. The discs themselves carry 4.7 GB (single layer) or 9.4 GB (dual layer) of data.