The DVD Forum is an international organization composed of hardware, software, media and content companies that use and develop the DVD and formerly HD DVD formats. It was initially known as the DVD Consortium when it was founded in 1995.

The DVD Forum was created to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas about the DVD format, and to enable it to grow through technical improvement and innovation. The organization hopes to promote worldwide acceptance of DVD for entertainment, consumer electronics and information technology applications. Membership in the DVD Forum is open to any company or organization involved in DVD research, development, or manufacturing; software firms and other DVD users interested in developing the format are also encouraged to join. Forum members can support other formats in addition to DVD.

The DVD Forum is responsible for the official DVD format specification. The group handles licensing of the DVD format and logo through the DVD Format and Logo Licensing Corporation (DVD FLLC), which also publishes the official "DVD Book" format specifications. Reference materials and newsletters are published for DVD Forum members.

DVD is an optical disc storage format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions.

Pre-recorded DVDs are mass-produced using molding machines that physically stamp data onto the DVD. Such discs are known as DVD-ROM, because data can only be read and not written nor erased. Blank recordable DVD discs (DVD-R and DVD+R) can be recorded once using a DVD recorder and then function as a DVD-ROM. Rewritable DVDs (DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM) can be recorded and erased multiple times.

DVDs are used in DVD-Video consumer digital video format and in DVD-Audio consumer digital audio format, as well as for authoring AVCHD discs. DVDs containing other types of information may be referred to as DVD data discs.

Before the advent of DVD, Video CD (VCD) became the first format for distributing digitally encoded films on standard 120 mm optical discs. (Its predecessor, CD Video, used analog video encoding.) VCD was on the market in 1993. In the same year, two new optical disc storage formats were being developed. One was the Multimedia Compact Disc (MMCD), backed by Philips and Sony, and the other was the Super Density (SD) disc, supported by Toshiba, Time Warner, Matsushita Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer, Thomson, and JVC.

Forum (plural forums, fora, or fori) may refer to:

Danielle Andrea Harris (born June 1, 1977) is an American film and television actress, best known as a scream queen for her multiple horror film roles, four of them in the Halloween series: in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers as Jamie Lloyd and in the new version of Halloween and Halloween II as Annie Brackett.

Aside from her scream queen reputation, Harris is known as a former child star whose career has grown to include various independent films as well as such mainstream hits as Marked for Death, The Last Boy Scout, Daylight and the aforementioned Halloween films. She is also noted for her voice acting, which includes the complete TV series run of The Wild Thornberrys (1998–2004, as Debbie Thornberry) and Father of the Pride (2004–05, as Sierra).

Harris was born in Queens, New York, and raised by her single mother, Fran. Harris's family moved to Port Orange, Florida and there she attended Spruce Creek Elementary School.

Harris still lived in Florida, when winning a children's beauty contest found her in New York. Moving back there, Harris began her professional career by appearing in television commercials while maintaining an A average at PS 117 and PS 232 in Queens, New York.^{[citation needed]} Her first acting role followed in 1985, when she made her debut as little Samantha 'Sami' Garretson on ABC's One Life to Live, a part she would continue to play for three years.