DVD (commonly "Digital Versatile Disc" or "Digital Video Disc") is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. DVDs resemble compact discs as their diameter is the same (120 mm (4.72 inches) or occasionally 80 mm (3.15 inches) in diameter), but they are encoded in a different format and at a much higher density.

All read-only DVD discs, regardless of type, are DVD-ROM discs. This includes replicated (factory pressed), recorded (burned), video, audio, and data DVDs. A DVD with properly formatted and structured video content is a DVD-Video. DVDs with properly formatted and structured audio are DVD-Audio discs. Everything else (including other types of DVD discs with video) is referred to as a DVD-Data disc. However, many people use the term "DVD-ROM" to refer to pressed data disks only (more).