DVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on
DVD discs, and is currently the dominant consumer video format in
Asia,
North America,
Europe, and
Australia. Discs using the DVD-Video specification require a DVD drive and an MPEG-2 decoder (e. g., a DVD player, or a computer DVD drive with a software DVD player). Commercial DVD movies are encoded using a combination MPEG-2 compressed video and audio of varying formats (often multi-channel formats as described below). Typically, the data rate for DVD movies ranges from 3
Mbit/s to 9.5 Mbit/s, and the
bit rate is usually adaptive. It was first available for retail around March 26, 1997.