The book type is a field of four
bits at the start of every
DVD
The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) 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 ki ...
(in the physical format information section of the control data block) that indicates what the physical format of the disc is. Many devices will use this field to determine how the disc should be treated.
One common cause of compatibility problems is the failure of a device to recognize the book type of the disc, most likely because the device had been manufactured before that particular book type was defined; for example, most DVD playback devices made before mid-2004 cannot recognize the relatively new
DVD+R DL Book Type. For
DVD+R,
DVD+RW
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 a ...
, and
DVD+R DL discs, it is possible to change the book type field value to the value associated with the DVD-ROM format (or in some rare and unorthodox cases, even the value associated with the DVD-R format—though only DVD+R can be changed to this) in order to fool older devices, which is a trick known as ''bitsetting''.
These are the possible values of the Book Type Field:
See also
*
Media Identification Code
*
Burst cutting area
*
Rainbow Books
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.
A number of these specifications hav ...
, the other types of books for optical discs
*
File format § Magic number
*
Wobble frequency
*
ROM Mark
References
{{reflist
External links
CD Freaks Article''Increased compatibility: DVD bitsetting''
DVDPlusRW.org Search pageSearch devices for Compatibility Settings
DVD