1995-2000

The DV format records video using the intraframe video process using discrete cosine transform (DCT) compression, while storing audio uncompressed.

The characteristics of the DV family, the codec and tape format used to store digital video, were defined in 1995 by the camcorder consortium led by Sony and Panasonic.

In the early 2000s, DV greatly helped the analog-to-digital transition in the world of video recording.

DV is sometimes called MiniDV, which is the most popular tape format among systems using the DV codec.

Following the ITU-R Rec. 601 standard, DV uses interlaced scanning with 13.5 MHz luminance sampling, resulting in a resolution of 480 lines per frame in a 60 Hz system or 576 lines per frame in a 50 Hz standard.

In both systems, the active image content contains 720 pixels per line. DV uses the same frame size for both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, resulting in different pixel ratios for full-screen and widescreen video.

Before the DCT compression stage, chroma subsampling is applied to the source video to reduce the amount of data to be compressed. Baseline DV uses 4:1:1 sampling in its 60 Hz version and 4:2:0 sampling in its 50 Hz version.

Audio can be stored in two formats: 16-bit linear PCM stereo with a 48 kHz sampling rate (768 kbit/s per channel, 1.5 Mbit/s stereo), or four nonlinear 12-bit PCM channels with a 32 kHz sampling rate (384 kbit/s per channel, 1.5 Mbit/s four channels).

In addition, the DV specification supports 16-bit audio at 44.1 kHz (706 kbit/s per channel, 1.4 Mbit/s stereo), the same sampling rate as CD audio. In practice, 48 kHz stereo is the most common.