DVD Start

There were several formats developed for recording video on optical discs before the DVD. Optical recording technology was invented by David Paul Gregg and James Russell in 1958 and first patented in 1961. A consumer optical disc data format known as LaserDisc was developed in the United States, and first came to market in Atlanta, Georgia in 1978. It used much larger discs than the later formats. Due to the high cost of players and discs, consumer adoption of LaserDisc was very low in both North America and Europe, and was not widely used anywhere outside Japan and the more affluent areas of Southeast Asia, such as Hong-Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. CD Video released in 1987 used analog video encoding on optical discs matching the established standard 120 mm (4.7 in) size of audio CDs. Video CD (VCD) became one of the first formats for distributing digitally encoded films in this format, in 1993. In the same year, two new optical disc storage formats were being developed. One was the Multimedia Compact Disc (MMCD), backed by Philips and Sony, and the other was the Super Density (SD) disc, supported by Toshiba, Time Warner, Matsushita Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer, Thomson, and JVC. By the time of the press launches for both formats in January 1995, the MMCD nomenclature had been dropped, and Philips and Sony were referring to their format as Digital Video Disc.