Similar to a CD-ROM drive, a DVD Drive reads CDs, CD-ROMs, and the newer DVDs. The acronym DVD originally had no meaning, but has since been referred to as Digital Video Disk and Digital Versatile Disk. DVD's advantage over CDs is that it holds many times the capacity of a single CD. DVDs can also hold full-length movies and can be used double-sided for extra storage. Currently very few software titles are available only on DVD-ROM, but are also available on CD-ROM, usually requiring multiple CDs. DVD videos are only available on DVD though. DVD also requires and MPEG decoder card to view the Videos. Software DVD decoding can be done on very fast machines, but hardware decoding (simply meaning a piece of hardware is added to the computer along with the drive - a decoder card) will work much better. Some more discussion of this appears on the CD-ROM Drive Page.

Drive that reads DVD-ROMs; newer drives also can read audio CDs, CD-ROMs, CD-Rs, and CD-RWs. 7.25