Video Codecs/DV

DV (Digital Video) is both a video codec and a video/audio container format used primarily in camcorders. There also exist some Analog-to-DV converters like the Pinnacle MovieBox DV.

• As a container format, it contains video in DV (the codec) format, and audio in uncompressed PCM format. The audio can be either 2 channels at 16 bits and 48kHz, or 4 channels at 12 bits and 32 kHz. Each frame is exactly 120,000 bytes (NTSC) or 144,000 bytes (PAL), and the frame rate is fixed at the standard NTSC/PAL frame rate (29.97 or 25 frames per second, respectively).

• As a codec, it encodes video at 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL) pixels per frame. Frames are encoded independently, much like MJPEG?. Note that the field size is slightly wider than that of a standard television; the frame width must be cropped to 704 pixels to achieve the correct aspect ratio when displayed on a TV.

See (for example) http://www.adamwilt.com/DV.html for more information.