Video Formats



A short guide to popular video and DVD formats that we work with, and how to decide which one is the best to use for the type of project you are working with...

DVD-R

DVD-R is a specific format of DVD. It is able to be written to once, meaning that once we make your video to DVD transfer project, no further information will be able to be written to the DVD-R disc. It normally holds about 4.7 GB of information including your DVD menu, DVD title, DVD chapter menus, and the actual video footage.


DVD+R

The format that competes the most with the DVD-R disc is the DVD+R format. It is slightly different, and we have found that not a single customer has had any difficulty playing our DVD-R DVDs, while other services have reported that the DVD+R discs have some compatibility problems with consumer DVD players.


Rewritable DVDs

There are rewritable DVD discs available, but none are able to be played in most consumer set-top DVD players.


8mm/Video8 Videotapes

8mm videotapes were very popular in camcorders that many people used in the 1980's and 1990's. They should not be confused with 8mm film which is composed of film on a reel rather than in a videocassette format. 8mm tapes are higher quality than a standard VHS or VHS-C tape, and the color and sound seem to last on them for a few years longer than older formats of videotapes. If you have 8mm videocassette tapes that you recorded in your camcorder, we would be happy to convert them to DVD.


VHS and VHS-C Videotapes

VHS and VHS-C tapes are analog, and are much lower quality than the newer tape formats. For this reason, we are able to fit much more footage of the VHS and VHS-C tapes to DVD (for example, we can get between 3-4 hours of VHS or VHS-C video footage on a DVD, while newer tape formats such as MiniDV can only be transferred to our DVDs at about 90 minutes per tape). Because VHS and VHS-C videotapes are in the analog format, they will not have the same crystal clarity of newer tape formats. The good news is that once we transfer your old VHS or VHS-C footage to DVD, no further decrease in quality will occur no matter how many times you play the DVD.


MiniDV, Hi8 and Digital8 Tape Formats

While MiniDV videotapes are the newest, the Hi8 and Digital8 videotape formats are also very high quality. You will notice the difference in quality and clarity when you allow us to do you video to DVD transfer project. The colors and sounds from the MiniDV, Hi8 and Digital8 videotape formats are digital quality (or very close to digital quality). Because they are much higher quality, they take up more space on the DVD format so we can't squeeze as much footage of these digital formats to a DVD than we can of the analog tapes.


MiniDVD

A MiniDVD is an 80 mm diameter disc that is used in many of the newer camcorders. When recording at standard DVD quality it will hold about 30 minutes of video footage which takes up 1.4GB of data. If the slow play mode is used the quality is equivalent to a VHS recording and a standard MiniDVD disc will then hold about 120 minutes of video. MiniDVDs can be played back in most consumer DVD players.


Smartphone Video Files or Camcorders that Record to Disc

Both smartphones and camcorders that record directly to disc use many different types of video formats. Please contact us to make sure that we can work with your particular video files.


We also work with flash video (.flv), VOB (.vob), AVI (.avi), QuickTime (.mov or .qt), Windows Media Video (.wmv), MPEG4 (.mp4 or .m4v), MPEG1 (.mpg or .mpeg), MPEG2 (.mpg or .m2v), M4V (.m4v) and most 3GPP (.3gp), AVCHD, WEBM, MKV, HEVC/H.265, and H.264


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