Optical Discs

An optical disc is read by a laser. They have been used extensively to store and distribute music, movies, and computer programs and data. CD drives became commonplace in personal computers in the mid-1990s, and burners to create CD-ROMs on personal computers were common by the early 2000s. Later, the higher-capacity DVD format became common both for reading and writing as well, and the even newer BluRay format won a "format war" against rival HD-DVD to get some popularity at present, though physical formats in general are on the wane as a distribution format due to the widespread deployment of the high-bandwidth Internet.

See also:
 * Disk Image Formats
 * Filesystem

List of formats

 * Blu-ray Disc
 * M-Disc
 * UHD Blu-ray
 * CD (Compact Disc)
 * CD-DA (Compact Disc Digital Audio or Red Book)
 * CD-MIDI
 * CD-ROM (Yellow Book)
 * CD-ROM XA
 * Linked MultiSession
 * DD-CD (Double-density Compact Disc)
 * Enhanced CD
 * Photo CD (Beige Book)
 * CD-i (Green Book)
 * SACD (Super Audio CD or Scarlet Book)
 * VCD (Video CD or White Book)
 * Super Video CD
 * DVD
 * DVD-Audio
 * DVD-ROM
 * M-Disc
 * Enhanced Versatile Disc
 * GD-ROM
 * HD-DVD
 * China Blue High-Definition Disc
 * Laserdisc
 * LV-ROM
 * MiniDisc
 * Nintendo optical discs
 * Nintendo GameCube Game Disc
 * Nintendo Wii Optical Disc
 * Nintendo Wii U Optical Disc
 * Thomson-CSF system
 * Ultra Density Optical
 * Universal Media Disc

Links

 * Optical media longevity
 * "Archival Disc" standard formulated for professional-use next-generation optical discs (up to 1 TB capacity)
 * An Introduction to Optical Media Preservation by @archivetype
 * Library of Congress Recommended Format Specifications: Software/Gaming
 * Developing a Robust Migration Workflow for Preserving and Curating Hand-held Media
 * 5D nanostructured quartz glass optical memory could provide ‘unlimited’ data storage for a million years (but reference link there is already 404 Not Found!)
 * Preserving optical media from the command line