5D DVD

A 5D DVD is a digital storage medium akin to a DVD being developed by Peter Zijlstra, James Chon and Min Gu at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. In 2009, the developers estimated that the technology could be commercially ready in five to ten years.

Advantages over current discs

5D DVDs use a writing system that uses extremely tiny particles on which data is written, with multiple layers that are read by three different colors of laser (rather than only one, as is the case with DVDs and Blu-ray discs). According to the developers, this could result in discs with a capacity of 10 terabytes, approximately 2000 times the capacity of a standard DVD, compared to Holographic Versatile Disc technology, which has an estimated maximum disc capacity of 6 terabytes. The similarity of disc writing would also make it easier to make 5D DVD players backwards-compatible with existing CD and DVD technology.

References

DVD

DVD ( "digital versatile disc" or "digital video disc") is a digital optical disc storage format invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. The medium can store any kind of digital data and is widely used for software and other computer files as well as video programs watched using DVD players. 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 a form of DVD-ROMs, because data can only be read and not written or 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 many times.

DVDs are used in DVD-Video consumer digital video format and in DVD-Audio consumer digital audio format as well as for authoring DVD discs written in a special AVCHD format to hold high definition material (often in conjunction with AVCHD format camcorders). DVDs containing other types of information may be referred to as DVD data discs.