CD's and DVD's and How They Work

Have you ever wondered how CD's and DVD's worked? How they could store 650 MB of data on them? Or how you can burn a list of songs onto a CD-RW, and then erase and re-burn new songs onto the same disk? Well, the reasons are very complicated. So I will simplify them for you with one word, Laser.

When you write a DVD or a CD, you are using a laser to burn bumps into the disk's bottom, transparent side. When a DVD player reads your DVD, it is reading the Binary code that was burned onto the disk. When it burns a bump into the disk, that represents a zero. When there is a blank space on the disk, that represents a one. This is the Binary code of computers, and it is used to store compacted information on digital devices.

You may be wondering what the difference is between a DVD and a Blu-Ray? There are only two main differences. One is the Blu-Ray has another layer added on to the already made DVD. Then, the laser burns those ones and zeros into the disk. But what the laser does, instead of burning the ones and zeros normally, the laser burns it in smaller. So that it can fit more ones and zeros on the disk, which adds more room on the disk. Other than that, there are no other differences. Even the blue tint on the bottom of the disk is added for the looks.