DVD, also known as Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc, is an optical disc storage media format, generally used for video and data storage. Physically DVDs are of the same dimensions as compact discs (CDs), but has a significantly larger storage capacity.
DVD-ROM (read only memory) speaks to DVDs that have data that can only be read and not written; DVD-R and DVD+R (recordable) can record data only once, and then operate as a DVD-ROM; DVD-RW (re-writable), DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM (random access memory) can all record and erase data multiple times.
DVDs are of superior quality and are transferred without difficulty to a computer; however, the large file sizes and obscure file names are some drawbacks to using a DVD. Converting a DVD to an AVI or MPEG file provides benefits such as small and portable file sizes and your own file naming. Also, the files can be used for video editing.
Converting a DVD to AVI will eliminate issues which may arise if the DVD was copied in another format; these include poor quality and limited capacity which can result from using a DVD burner. The conversion can be facilitated by software programs such as DVDx, Fairuse Wizard, avi.Net, and Nero.