Compact disc

CDs and DVDs are everywhere these days. Whether they are used to
hold music, data or computer software, they have become the
standard medium for distributing large quantities of information in a
reliable package. Compact discs are so easy and cheap to produce
that America Online sends out millions of them every year to entice
new users. And if you have a computer and CD-R drive, you can
create your own CDs, including any information you want.
In this article, we will look at how CDs and CD drives work. We will
also look at the different forms CDs take, as well as what the future
holds lfor this technology.

Understanding the CD: Material

A CD can store up to 74 minutes of music, so the total amount of digital data that must be stored on a CD
is:
44,100 samples/channel/second x 2 bytes/sample x 2 channels x 74 minutes x 60 seconds/minute
= 783,216,000 bytes
To fit more than 783 megabytes (MB) onto a disc only 4.8 inches (12 cm) in diameter requires that the
individual bytes be very small. By examining the physical construction of a CD, you can begin to
understand just how small these bytes are.
A CD is a fairly simple piece of plastic, about four one-hundredths (4/100) of an inch (1.2 mm) thick. Most
of a CD consists of an injection-molded piece of clear polycarbonate plastic. During manufacturing,
this plastic is impressed with microscopic bumps arranged as a single, continuous, extremely long spiral
track of data. We'll return to the bumps in a moment. Once the clear piece of polycarbonate is formed, a
thin, reflective aluminum layer is sputtered onto the disc, covering the bumps. Then a thin acrylic layer is
sprayed over the aluminum to protect it. The label is then printed onto the acrylic. A cross section of a
complete CD (not to scale) looks like this:

Cross-section of a CD

Understanding the CD: The Spiral

A CD has a single spiral track of data, circling from the inside of the
disc to the outside. The fact that the spiral track starts at the center
means that the CD can be smaller than 4.8 inches (12 cm) if desired,
and in fact there are now plastic baseball cards and business cards
that you can put in a CD player. CD business cards hold about 2 MB
of data before the size and shape of the card cuts off the spiral.
What the picture on the right does not even begin to impress upon
you is how incredibly small the data track is -- it is approximately 0.5
microns wide, with 1.6 microns separating one track from the next. (A
micron is a millionth of a meter.) And the bumps are even more miniscule...

Understanding the CD: Bumps

The elongated bumps that make up the track are each 0.5 microns wide, a minimum of 0.83 microns long
and 125 nanometers high. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.) Looking through the polycarbonate
layer at the bumps, they look something like this:

You will often read about "pits" on a CD instead of bumps. They appear as pits on the aluminum side, but
on the side the laser reads from, they are bumps.
The incredibly small dimensions of the bumps make the spiral track on a CD extremely long. If you could
lift the data track off a CD and stretch it out into a straight line, it would be 0.5 microns wide and almost
3.5 miles (5 km) long!
To read something this small you need an incredibly precise disc-reading mechanism. Let's take a look at
that.

CD Player Components
The CD player has the job of finding and reading the data stored as bumps on the CD. Considering how
small the bumps are, the CD player is an exceptionally precise piece of equipment. The drive consists of
three fundamental components:

A drive motor spins the disc. This drive motor is precisely controlled to rotate between 200 and
500 rpm depending on which track is being read.

A laser and a lens system focus in on and read the bumps.

A tracking mechanism moves the laser assembly so that the laser's beam can follow the spiral
track. The tracking system has to be able to move the laser at micron resolutions.

Inside a CD player

What the CD Player Does: Laser Focus

Inside the CD player, there is a good bit of computer technology involved in forming the data into
understandable data blocks and sending them either to the DAC (in the case of an audio CD) or to the
computer (in the case of a CD-ROM drive).
The fundamental job of the CD player is to focus the laser on the track of bumps. The laser beam passes
through the polycarbonate layer, reflects off the aluminum layer and hits an opto-electronic device that
detects changes in light. The bumps reflect light differently than the "lands" (the rest of the aluminum
layer), and the opto-electronic sensor detects that change in reflectivity. The electronics in the drive
interpret the changes in reflectivity in order to read the bits that make up the bytes.

What the CD Player Does: Tracking

The hardest part is keeping the laser beam centered on the data track. This centering is the job of the
tracking system. The tracking system, as it plays the CD, has to continually move the laser outward. As
the laser moves outward from the center of the disc, the bumps move past the laser faster -- this happens
because the linear, or tangential, speed of the bumps is equal to the radius times the speed at which the
disc is revolving (rpm). Therefore, as the laser moves outward, the spindle motor must slow the speed of
the CD. That way, the bumps travel past the laser at a constant speed, and the data comes off the disc at
a constant rate.

CD Encoding Issues
If you have a CD-R drive, and want to produce your own audio CDs
or CD-ROMs, one of the great things you've got going in your favor is
the fact that software can handle all the details for you. You can say
to your software, "Please store these songs on this CD," or "Please
store these data files on this CD-ROM," and the software will do the
rest. Because of this, you don't need to know anything about CD data
formatting to create your own CDs. However, CD data formatting is
complex and interesting, so let's go into it anyway.
To understand how data are stored on a CD, you need to understand
all of the different conditions the designers of the data encoding
Recordable CD

methodology were trying to handle. Here is a fairly complete list:

Because the laser is tracking the spiral of data using the bumps, there cannot be extended gaps
where there are no bumps in the data track. To solve this problem, data is encoded using EFM (eightfourteen modulation). In EFM, 8-bit bytes are converted to 14 bits, and it is guaranteed by EFM that some
of those bits will be 1s.

Because the laser wants to be able to move between songs, data needs to be encoded into the
music telling the drive "where it is" on the disc. This problem is solved using what is known as subcode
data. Subcode data can encode the absolute and relative position of the laser in the track, and can also
encode such things as song titles.

Because the laser may misread a bump, there need to be error-correcting codes to handle
single-bit errors. To solve this problem, extra data bits are added that allow the drive to detect single-bit
errors and correct them.

Because a scratch or a speck on the CD might cause a whole packet of bytes to be misread
(known as a burst error), the drive needs to be able to recover from such an event. This problem is solved
by actuallyinterleaving the data on the disc, so that it is stored non-sequentially around one of the disc's

circuits. The drive actually reads data one revolution at a time, and un-interleaves the data in order to play
it.

If a few bytes are misread in music, the worst thing that can happen is a little fuzz during
playback. When data is stored on a CD, however, any data error is catastrophic. Therefore, additional
error correction codes are used when storing data on a CD-ROM.

CD Data Formats
There are several different formats used to store data on a CD, some widely used and some longforgotten. The two most common are CD-DA (audio) and CD-ROM (computer data).

DVD Discs

A DVD can store almost eight hours of CD-quality music per side.

A DVD is very similar to a CD, but it has a much larger data capacity. A standard DVD holds about
seven times more data than a CD does. This huge capacity means that a DVD has enough room to store
a full-length, MPEG-2-encoded movie, as well as a lot of other information.
Here are the typical contents of a DVD movie:

Up to 133 minutes of high-resolution video, in letterbox or pan-and-scan format, with 720 dots of
horizontal resolution (The video compression ratio is typically 40:1 using MPEG-2 compression.)

Soundtrack presented in up to eight languages using 5.1 channel Dolby digital surround sound

Subtitles in up to 32 languages
DVD can also be used to store almost eight hours of CD-quality music per side.
The format offers many advantages over VHS tapes:

DVD picture quality is better, and many DVDs have Dolby Digital or DTS sound, which is much
closer to the sound you experience in a movie theater.

Many DVD movies have an on-screen index, where the creator of the DVD has labeled many of
the significant parts of the movie, sometimes with a picture. With your remote, if you select the part of the
movie you want to view, the DVD player will take you right to that part, with no need to rewind or fastforward.

DVD players are compatible with audio CDs.

Some DVD movies have both the letterbox format, which fits wide-screen TVs, and the standard
TV size format, so you can choose which way you want to watch the movie.

DVD movies may have several soundtracks on them, and they may provide subtitles in different
languages. Foreign movies may give you the choice between the version dubbed into your language, or
the original soundtrack with subtitles in your language.

DVD Layers
DVDs are of the same diameter and thickness as CDs, and they are made using some of the same
materials and manufacturing methods. Like a CD, the data on a DVD is encoded in the form of small pits
and bumps in the track of the disc.
A DVD is composed of several layers of plastic, totaling about 1.2 millimeters thick. Each layer is created
by injection molding polycarbonate plastic. This process forms a disc that has microscopic bumps
arranged as a single, continuous and extremely long spiral track of data. More on the bumps later.
Once the clear pieces of polycarbonate are formed, a thin reflective layer is sputtered onto the disc,
covering the bumps. Aluminum is used behind the inner layers, but a semi-reflective gold layer is used for
the outer layers, allowing the laser to focus through the outer and onto the inner layers. After all of the
layers are made, each one is coated with lacquer, squeezed together and cured under infrared light. For
single-sided discs, the label is silk-screened onto the nonreadable side. Double-sided discs are printed
only on the nonreadable area near the hole in the middle. Cross sections of the various types of
completed DVDs (not to scale) look like this:

Each writable layer of a DVD has a spiral track of data. On singlelayer DVDs, the track always circles from the inside of the disc to the
outside. That the spiral track starts at the center means that a singlelayer DVD can be smaller than 12 centimeters if desired.
What the image to the left cannot impress upon you is how incredibly
tiny the data track is -- just 740 nanometers separate one track from
the next (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter). And the elongated
bumps that make up the track are each 320 nanometers wide, a
minimum of 400 nanometers long and 120 nanometers high. The
following figure illustrates looking through the polycarbonate layer at
the bumps.
You will often read about "pits" on a
DVD instead of bumps. They
appear as pits on the aluminum
side, but on the side that
the laser reads from, they are
bumps.
The microscopic dimensions of the
bumps make the spiral track on a
DVD extremely long. If you could lift
the data track off a single layer of a
DVD, and stretch it out into a
straight line, it would be almost 7.5
miles long! That means that a double-sided, double-layer DVD would have 30 miles (48 km) of data!
To read bumps this small you need an incredibly precise disc-reading mechanism.

DVD Storage Capacity

DVDs can store more data than CDs for a few reasons:

Higher-density data storage

Less overhead, more area

Multi-layer storage
Higher Density Data Storage
Single-sided, single-layer DVDs can store about seven times more data than CDs. A large part of this
increase comes from the pits and tracks being smaller on DVDs.
Track Pitch

CD = 1600 nanometers

DVD = 740 nanometers

Minimum Pit Length (single-layer DVD)

CD = 830 nanometers

DVD = 400 nanometers

Minimum Pit Length (double-layer DVD)

CD = 830 nanometers

DVD = 440 nanometers

Let's try to get an idea of how much more data can be stored due to the physically tighter spacing of pits
on a DVD. The track pitch on a DVD is 2.16 times smaller, and the minimum pit length for a single-layer
DVD is 2.08 times smaller than on a CD. By multiplying these two numbers, we find that there is room for
about 4.5 times as many pits on a DVD. So where does the rest of the increase come from?
Less Overhead, More Area
On a CD, there is a lot of extra information encoded on the disc to allow for error correction -- this
information is really just a repetition of information that is already on the disc. The error correction scheme
that a CD uses is quite old and inefficient compared to the method used on DVDs. The DVD format
doesn't waste as much space on error correction, enabling it to store much more real information. Another
way that DVDs achieve higher capacity is by encoding data onto a slightly larger area of the disc than is
done on a CD.
Multi-Layer Storage
To increase the storage capacity even more, a DVD can have up to four layers, two on each side. The
laser that reads the disc can actually focus on the second layer through the first layer. Here is a list of the
capacities of different forms of DVDs:

Single-sided/Single-layer

4.38 GB

2 hours movie time

Single-sided/Double-layer

7.95 GB

4 hours movie time

Double-sided/Single-layer

8.75 GB

4.5 hours movie time

Double-sided/Double-layer

15.9 GB

Over 8 hours movie time

You may be wondering why the capacity of a DVD doesn't double when you add a whole second layer to
the disc. This is because when a disc is made with two layers, the pits have to be a little longer, on both
layers, than when a single layer is used. This helps to avoid interference between the layers, which would
cause errors when the disc is played.

DVD Video
Even though its storage capacity is huge, the uncompressed video data of a full-length movie would never
fit on a DVD. In order to fit a movie on a DVD, you need video compression. A group called the Moving
Picture Experts Group (MPEG) establishes the standards for compressing moving pictures.
When movies are put onto DVDs, they are encoded in MPEG-2 format and then stored on the disc. This
compression format is a widely accepted international standard. Your DVD player contains an MPEG-2
decoder, which can uncompress this data as quickly as you can watch it.
The MPEG-2 Format and Data Size Reduction
A movie is usually filmed at a rate of 24 frames per second. This means that every second, there are 24
complete images displayed on the movie screen. American and Japanese television use a format called
NTSC, which displays a total of 30 frames per second; but it does this in a sequence of 60 fields, each of
which contains alternating lines of the picture. Other countries use PAL format, which displays at 50 fields
per second, but at a higher resolution (see How Video Formatting Works for details on these formats).
Because of the differences in frame rate and resolution, an MPEG movie needs to be formatted for either
the NTSC or the PAL system.
The MPEG encoder that creates the compressed movie file analyzes each frame and decides how to
encode it. The compression uses some of the same technology as still image compression does to

eliminate redundant or irrelevant data. It also uses information from other frames to reduce the overall
size of the file. Each frame can be encoded in one of three ways:

As an intraframe - An intraframe contains the complete image data for that frame. This method of
encoding provides the least compression.

As a predicted frame - A predicted frame contains just enough information to tell the DVD player
how to display the frame based on the most recently displayed intraframe or predicted frame. This means
that the frame contains only the data that relates to how the picture has changed from the previous frame.

As a bidirectional frame - In order to display this type of frame, the player must have the
information from the surrounding intraframe or predicted frames. Using data from the closest surrounding
frames, it uses interpolation (something like averaging) to calculate the position and color of each pixel.
Depending on the type of scene being converted, the encoder will decide which types of frames to use. If
a newscast were being converted, a lot more predicted frames could be used, because most of the scene
is unaltered from one frame to the next. On the other hand, if a very fast action scene were being
converted, in which things changed very quickly from one frame to the next, more intraframes would have
to be encoded. The newscast would compress to a much smaller size than the action sequence.
If all of this sounds complicated, then you are starting to get a feeling for how much work your DVD player
does to decode an MPEG-2 movie. A lot of processing power is required; even some computers with DVD
players can't keep up with the processing required to play a DVD movie.

DVD Audio
DVD audio and DVD video are
different formats. DVD audio discs
and players are relatively rare right
now, but they will become more
common, and the difference in
sound quality should be noticeable.
In order to take advantage of
higher-quality DVD audio discs, you
will need a DVD player with a
192kHz/24-bit
digital-to-analog
converter (DAC). Most DVD players
have only a 96kHz/24-bit digital-toanalog converter. So if you want to
be able to listen to DVD audio
discs, be sure to look for a DVD audio player with a 192kHz/24-bit digital-to-analog converter.
DVD audio recordings can provide far better sound quality than CDs. The chart below lists the sampling
rate and accuracy for CD recordings and the maximum sampling rate and accuracy for DVD recordings.
CDs can hold 74 minutes of music. DVD audio discs can hold 74 minutes of music at their highest quality
level, 192kHz/24-bit audio. By lowering either the sampling rate or the accuracy, DVDs can be made to

hold more music. A DVD audio disc can store up to two hours of 6-channel, better than CD quality,
96kHz/24-bit music. Lower the specifications further, and a DVD audio disc can hold almost seven hours
of CD-quality audio.
Sampling Rate

CD Audio = 441. kHz

DVD Audio = 192 kHz

Samples Per Second

CD Audio = 44,100

DVD Audio = 192,000

Sampling Accuracy

CD Audio = 16-bit

DVD Audio = 24.bit

Number of Possible Output Levels

CD Audio = 65,536

DVD Audio = 16,777,216

In an audio CD or DVD, each bit represents a digital command telling the DAC what voltage level to
output (see How Analog and Digital Recording Works for details). While an ideal recording would follow
the raw waveform exactly, digital recordings sample the sound at different frequencies, and therefore lose
some of the data.
The graph above shows how the highest quality DVD audio compares to CD audio. You can see that DVD
follows the signal more closely, but it's still a long way from perfect.
To get the full experience of the Dolby Digital sound used on many DVDs, you need a home
theatersystem with five speakers, a subwoofer, and a receiver that is either "Dolby Digital ready" or has a
built-in Dolby Digital decoder.
If your receiver is Dolby Digital ready, then it does not have a Dolby Digital decoder, so you need to buy
a DVD player with its own Dolby Digital decoder and 5.1 channel outputs. If you also want your system to
be compatible with DTS sound, then your DVD player will need a DTS decoder, too.
If your receiver has its own Dolby Digital decoder and DTS decoder, then you don't need a DVD player
with 5.1 channel outputs, and you can save some money on cables by using the digital outputs.

DVDs and Laser Discs

Laser disc is an older technology. It offered a better picture and better sound than videotapes, and it is
comparable to DVD. But the laser disc format is analog; DVDs are digital. Laser discs are only used for
prerecorded movies, and they are larger, about 12 inches (30.5 centimeters) in diameter, instead the 5inch (12.7-centimeter) diameter of DVDs. The two formats usually can't be played on the same machine.

DVD FAQ
What does "DVD" stand for?
"DVD" stands for digital versatile disc, but some sources declare that it doesn't stand for anything
anymore.
Can I record television shows or movies on a DVD player?
Yes, you can -- if your DVD player is also a DVD recorder.
Can I play CDs on a DVD player?
Yes. DVD players are completely compatible with audio compact discs. And music will become
increasingly available in DVD format.
What is the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R?
DVD+ ("plus") and DVD- ("dash") are two competing DVD formats. You may remember the "war" between
the Betamax and VHS formats for domination of the VCR market. The big difference with DVD+R vs.
DVD-R is that there are hybrid (dual-format) drives capable of reading both types. Many companies have
taken sides -- the DVD Forum is a group of manufacturers that support DVD-R, while the DVD+RW
Alliancesupports that format. Consumers have yet to make either format the winner.
What are region codes?
Movie studios use region codes on DVDs to thwart unauthorized copying, and to control the release dates
of DVD movies. The actual region code is stored in one byte on the DVD. The DVD player or drive has a
region code in its firmware. Personal computer DVD-ROM players often have the code in the software or
in the MPEG-2 decoder.
For the player or drive to play the movie, the two codes must match. The code is also printed on the back
of a DVD package, superimposed on a small image of the globe. If you have a DVD that was made for
release in Asia, you won't be able to play it on a DVD player intended for use in Australia.
For more information on DVDs, DVD players and related topics, check out the links on the next page.
Laser discs can only hold an hour on each side, so you have to flip the disc to watch the second half of
the movie.
Because of DVD compression techniques, DVDs can hold more data. You rarely have to flip a DVD to
watch a whole movie. Laser disc players are noisier than DVD players, and they can sometimes suffer
"laser rot" -- the aluminum side of the disc oxidizes, and the quality of the disc deteriorates. DVDs are less
likely to have this problem, because manufacturing techniques have improved. As the popularity of DVD
grows, laser discs are becoming harder to find.