This article needs to be updated. The reason given is: DVD FLLC has announced the deactivation of their website on January 1, 2025 and mentioned a "scheme that enable any Licensees to manufacture DVD products without 'License' on and after January 1, 2025". Also, according to the Charter of the DVD Forum, the Forum will be dissolved on February 1, 2025. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(November 2024)
Industry association that developed the DVD format
DVD Forum
Formerly
DVD Consortium (1995-1996)
Founded
1995 (as DVD Consortium) 1996 (as DVD Forum)
Defunct
2025
The DVD Forum was an international organization composed of hardware, software, media and production companies that use and develop the DVD and formerly HD DVD formats[1]. 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, another evolution of the LaserDisc 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.[citation needed]
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.[2] Reference materials and newsletters are published for DVD Forum members.[citation needed]
In 2003, the DVD Forum had 213 members.[3] In 2007, it had 195 registered members.[4] In 2008, it had 159 registered members,[5] and in 2010, it had 98 registered members.[6] In 2012 this downward trend continued with the membership standing at 80 members.[7] Since 1 April 2012, the Forum is in a "Reduced Activity Mode",[8] however the DVD FLLC is still active as of 2020.[9] In October 2024, the DVD FLLC announced the deactivation of its website and confirmed that they were "preparing the scheme that enables any Licensees to manufacture DVD products without 'License' on and after January 1, 2025."
In January 2025, the DVD FLLC announced its own dissolution on January 31, 2025 (together with the DVD Forum itself, acccording to its charter[10]) and the deposit of the DVD Specifications at the National Diet Library of Japan.
The DVD Forum is governed by an elected Steering Committee. It has a Chair Company, and three Vice-Chair Companies: one from each of the consumer electronics, information technology, and content industries. The Chair and Vice-Chair Companies are elected for two-year terms.
In addition to the Steering Committee, the DVD Forum has the following committees:
Technical Coordination Group – to coordinate activities of the Working Groups and submit technical proposals to the Steering Committee
a number of Working Groups – to work on various aspects of the DVD format.
Promotion & Communication Committee – to promote the exchange of information among participants
Verification Policy Committee – to maintain compliance of DVD products with the DVD Formats adopted by the DVD Forum
Format/Logo Advisory Group – to advise the Steering Committee on matters relating to names and logos and the licensing of DVD Formats and DVD logos
Competing standards developed by the rival DVD+RW Alliance are for the "plus" formats (DVD+R, DVD+RW). Alliance leaders Philips, Sony and Thomson were also founding members of the DVD Forum, established in 1997. As of 2009[update], both plus and dash formats seem equally popular with customers, and both are compatible with the vast majority of DVD players.
JVC is a Japanese brand owned by JVCKenwood. Founded in 1927 as the Victor Talking Machine Company of Japan and later as Victor Company of Japan, Ltd., the company was best known for introducing Japan's first televisions and for developing the Video Home System (VHS) video recorder.
DVD-RAM is a DVD-based disc specification presented in 1996 by the DVD Forum, which specifies rewritable DVD-RAM media and the appropriate DVD writers. DVD-RAM media have been used in computers as well as camcorders and personal video recorders since 1998.
The DVD+RW Alliance is a group of electronic hardware, optical storage and software manufacturers who in 1997 created and promoted a format standard of recordable and rewritable DVDs, known as the "plus" format. As of 2004, plus format DVDs were available in three forms: DVD+R, DVD+RW, and DVD+R DL. In late 2005 DVD+RW DL was developed but never produced commercially.
The Rainbow Books are a collection of CD format specifications, generally written and published by the companies involved in their development, including Philips, Sony, Matsushita and JVC, among others.
High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from a source device, such as a display controller, to a computer monitor, video projector, digital television, or digital audio device. HDMI is a digital replacement for analog video standards.
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The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) is the industry consortium that develops and licenses Blu-ray technology and is responsible for establishing format standards and promoting business opportunities for Blu-ray Disc. The BDA is divided into three levels of membership: the board of directors, contributors, and general members.
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The Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) is an optical disc technology that was expected to store up to several terabytes of data on an optical disc 10 cm or 12 cm in diameter. Its development commenced in April 2004. The technology was abandoned due to funding issues. One of the responsible companies went bankrupt in 2010.
DVD recordable and DVD rewritable are a collection of optical disc formats that can be written to by a DVD recorder and by computers using a DVD writer. The "recordable" discs are write-once read-many (WORM) media, where as "rewritable" discs are able to be erased and rewritten. Data is written ("burned") to the disc by a laser, rather than the data being "pressed" onto the disc during manufacture, like a DVD-ROM. Pressing is used in mass production, primarily for the distribution of home video.
The OpenAjax Alliance is an industry group dedicated to the set of technologies and web programming techniques known as Ajax.
The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum was a non-profit organization to advance the Linux operating system as an open-source software platform for consumer electronics (CE) devices. It had a primarily technical focus, working on specifications, implementations, conferences and testing to help Linux developers improve Linux for use in CE products. It existed from 2003 to 2010.
The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGF models its process on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and produces documents with many acronyms such as OGSA, OGSI, and JSDL.
The DVD-VR standard defines a logical format for video recording on DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-RAM style media, including the dual layer versions of these media. As opposed to media recorded with the DVD+VR recording standard, the resulting media are not DVD-Video compliant, and do not play back in some DVD-Video players. Most DVD video recorders in the market that support DVD-R, DVD-RW, or DVD-RAM media record to these media in DVD-VR mode, as well as in a DVD-Video compliant mode. It is possible to use the DVD-VR format with DVD+R and DVD+RW media, but no examples are known other than some PC based recording utilities.
The DVD is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind of digital data and has been widely used to store video programs, software and other computer files. DVDs offer significantly higher storage capacity than compact discs (CD) while having the same dimensions. A standard single-layer DVD can store up to 4.7 GB of data, a dual-layer DVD up to 8.5 GB. Variants can store up to a maximum of 17.08 GB.
HD DVD is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video. Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format, but lost out to Blu-ray, which was supported by Sony and others.
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DVD-Video was a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVDs. DVD-Video was the dominant consumer home video format in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia in the 2000s until it was supplanted by the high-definition Blu-ray Disc; both receive competition as delivery methods by streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+. Discs using the DVD-Video specification require a DVD drive and an MPEG-2 decoder. Commercial DVD movies are encoded using a combination of MPEG-2 compressed video and audio of varying formats. Typically, the data rate for DVD movies ranges from 3 to 9.5 Mbit/s, and the bit rate is usually adaptive. DVD-Video was first available in Japan on October 19, 1996, followed by a release on March 24, 1997, in the United States.
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