miniDVD

miniDVD has two definitions, separate from each other:

1) In this meaning of miniDVD, it is not a real format, but a hack instead that uses standalone DVD players' abilities to play back regular CDs.

Basically miniDVD is a regular CD that has the same structure as regular DVD-Video has. Most of the standalone DVD players can be fooled to think that the disc inserted is a regular DVD-Video disc and to play it.

Biggest problem with miniDVDs is the fact that DVD movies tend to take appx. 4GBs of space and in CD you can just fit ~700MB of data -> one movie ends up taking 6 or more CDs. Therefor most of the people don't use miniDVDs, but use some other standalone DVD player-compliant formats instead, like VCDs, SVCDs or their varieties.

2) Also, more officially, miniDVD (also called as mini DVD, Mini DVD and MiniDVD) refers to a standard DVD disc which is otherwise identical to the normal DVD, but has smaller diameter of only 8cm.

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AIPO 13 May, 2009 8:30
80mm disks (mini DVD) can fit up to half an hour of 'Hollywood' quality video, and are a lot less likely to be damaged in the post, so they are perfect for distributing advertising films and so on. The only problem with them is that they will destroy Apple slot drives (there are, apparently, other slot loading drives which will take them) so it's a VERY GOOD IDEA to mark them clearly as 'not suitable for slot loading, tray loading only!!!', or people will try and charge you for their destroyed MacBook!! Note, MiniDVD, or DVD-1 (single layer, 1.4 Gb, DVD-2, double layer, 2.6 Gb) ARE officially part of the DVD spec, and EVERY player should be able to play them (or it's NOT a 'proper' DVD player.... but Apple decided to ignore this part of the spec. Which was rather silly IMHO, they are very useful.

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