DVD Compendium
Everything about DVDs and Blu-ray: creating, copying, archiving. 25+ years of disc knowledge, compact and easy to understand.
DVDs are over 25 years old – and still surprisingly relevant. In the DVD Compendium, we share knowledge from three decades of disc software development: from the first DVD burners in the early 2000s to today's topics around digitizing and archiving.
Whether you want to create DVDs from your own material, convert your old DVD collection to modern formats, or simply understand how the underlying technology works – you'll find what you're looking for here.
What is it about?
25+ topics, structured into three thematic clusters.
Understanding DVD
How a DVD is structured, what specifications exist, and which disc type is for what purpose.
- DVD Books (A–E)
- Physical & Logical Structure
- DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RAM, DVD±RW
- UDF File System
- Special & Alternative Formats
Video & Audio
From image to sound format: everything that makes DVDs a movie disc – including background information.
- Video-DVD & DVD-Audio
- Aspect Ratio & TV Standards
- Dolby Digital, DTS, MPEG-Audio
- MPEG-2 Compression
- Audio & Video Quality
Digitizing & Archiving
What you really need in 2026: DVD collection to MP4, understanding Blu-ray, permanently backing up movies.
- Digitize DVDs (MP4, MKV)
- Properly archive movies
- Blu-ray vs. UHD Blu-ray
- Video formats compared
- DVD copy protection (CSS, Region Codes)
All terms at a glance
Terms sorted alphabetically by cluster.
📐 Understanding DVD
🎥 Video & Audio
📜 Engelmann Story: With MovieJack around 2003, we had probably the most successful DVD Ripper in the world – known in the USA as "DVDCopyPlus 5". After a copyright amendment in 2004, it disappeared from the German market. Today, MovieJack is a streaming recording software, but its original spirit lives on.
More from the Engelmann Blog
Tips, tutorials and background knowledge from over 30 years of software development – practical topics around burning, digitizing, data recovery and formats.
🔥 Software for your DVD projects
Whether burning, converting or digitizing – we have the right tool. CDRWIN also burns DVDs (for free), MyFormatConverter converts any video to any format, MovieJack saves streams.