Creating Video for Teachers and Trainers: Producing Professional Video with Amateur Equipment

Chapter 21

Video on Optical Media

While distributing video on discs is far less common now than streaming video on the web, there may be times when you need to hand out discs. Maybe your learners do not have good Internet connections because they are in an unserved location, or an Internet connection is more expensive than they can reasonably afford. Perhaps because of confidentiality concerns you want to be able to retrieve copies of the video after use.

In this brief chapter we'll talk about different formats and capabilities of optical discs for video.

CD, DVD, Blu-ray

First, let's look at the media choices we have. CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray are all optical discs, in that the disc drive reads them with a laser. The laser light reflected back ...