A DVD+RW is a rewritable optical disc with equal storage capacity to a DVD+R, typically 4.7 GB (interpreted as ≈ 4.7 · 10⁹, actually 2295104 sectors of 2048 bytes each). The format was developed by a coalition of corporations, known as the DVD+RW Alliance, in late 1997, although the standard was abandoned until 2001, when it was heavily revised and the capacity increased from 2.8 GB to 4.7 GB. Credit for developing the standard is often attributed unilaterally to Philips, one of the members of the DVD+RW Alliance. Although DVD+RW has not yet been approved by the DVD Forum, the format is too popular for manufacturers to ignore, and as such, DVD+RW discs are playable in 3/4 of today's DVD players.

Unlike the DVD-RW format, DVD+RW was made a standard earlier than DVD+R.

One competing rewritable format is DVD-RW. Hybrid drives that can handle both, often labeled "DVD±RW", are very popular since there is not yet a single standard for recordable DVDs.

DVD+RW discs can be rewritten about 1,000 times, making them comparable with the CD-RW standard. DVD+RW discs are commonly used for volatile data, such as backups or collections of files. However, they are not as widely used for home DVD video recorders as DVD-RW, primarily because they were originally designed for storage of data, rather than of video.

DVD+RW disks purportedly support a feature called "lossless linking" which is supposed to allow some amount of re-writing without requiring a full erasure of the disc.

External links

• DVD+RW Alliance