Concept of DVD-R DL presented at DVD Forum conference

October 7, 2004

The HD-DVD format, DualDiscs, copy protections, the concept of DVD-R DL and faster speeds for DVD-R/RW/RAM are some of the topics at DVD Forum's Japan conference. As faster speeds are introduced for DVD-RW and DVD-RAM problems with backward compatibility with slower speeds however arise. DVD Forum therefore wants to introduce a class system and new logotypes to differentiate the high speed discs from the slower ones. For version 1.2 of DVD-RW the 1x discs will be class 0 while the 2x-6x discs will be class 1. For DVD-RAM the 2x-5x discs will be class 0 while the 6x-16x discs when introduced are suggested to be class 1.

When it comes to DVD-R DL it is expected to have the following basic properties:

Concept of Dual Layer DVD-R: Keep the same concept as current DVD-R

User data capacity is 8.54 Gbytes per side for 12cm disc, 2.66 Gbytes per side for a 8cm disc.
Recorded disc characteristics are conformed to those of Dual Layer DVD Read-Only disc. The recorded Dual Layer DVD-R disc is equivalent to a Dual Layer DVD Read-Only disc in playability.
Dual Layer DVD-R Specifications keep the concept of DVD Copy management of which security is same as that of the current DVD-R Specifications.
Dual Layer DVD-R disc is not expected before, therefore there are some players or drive to refuse record or playback of the disc even they are designed following the current specification. However that is rather small fraction of existing devices.
Compliance to playback of the Dual Layer DVD-R disc will be recommended to player manufacturers.

Unrecorded disc Specifications

Basic recording speed