Toronto Video Editing - More on DVDs
DVD-Video discs require a DVD-drive and an MPEG-2 decoder (e.g. a DVD-player, or a DVD computer drive with a software DVD player). Commercial DVD movies are encoded using a combination of MPEG-2 compressed video and audio of varying formats (often multi-channel formats as described below). Typical data rates for DVD movies range from 3–10 Mbit/s, and the bit rate is usually adaptive. The typical video resolution for an NTSC disc is 720 × 480, while a PAL disc is 720 × 576.
All MPEG video must be 25 frames per second on PAL DVDs. On NTSC DVDs MPEG-2 video can be either 29.97 frames per second or 23.976 frames per second, (with 3:2 pulldown) while MPEG-1 video can only be 29.97 frames per second. Interlacing is only supported for MPEG-2 video on both PAL and NTSC DVDs. 16:9 anamorphic video is only supported at 720x576/480. Note that some DVD-hardware or software players may play discs whose MPEG files do not conform to the above standards- however these discs are non-compliant with the specification for DVD-video. Some hardware players will now play DVD-ROMs or CD-ROMs containing MPEG video files - these are 'unauthored' and lack the file structure that defines a DVD-video. (These files contain extra information, such as the number of video tracks, chapters and links to extra features, which DVD players use to navigate a DVD-video). (more)

