Mini DV

DV is a format for storing digital video. It was launched in 1995 with joint efforts of leading producers of video camera recorders.

The original DV specification, known as Blue Book, was standardized within the IEC 61834 family of standards. These standards define common features such as physical videocassettes, recording modulation method, magnetization, and basic system data in part 1. Part 2 describes the specifics of 525-60 and 625-50 systems.[1] The IEC standards are copyrighted publications available for purchase from IEC or ANSI.

File-based media

With proliferation of tapeless camcorder video recording, DV video can be recorded on optical discs, solid state flash memory cards and hard disk drives and used as computer files. In particular:
Sony XDCAM family of cameras can record DV onto either Professional Disc or SxS memory cards.
Panasonic DVCPRO HD and AVC-Intra camcorders can record DV (as well as DVCPRO) onto P2 cards.
Some Panasonic AVCHD camcorders (AG-HMC80, AG-AC130, AG-AC160) record DV video onto Secure Digital memory cards.
JVC GY-HM750 records DV video onto either Secure Digital or SxS memory cards.
Most DV and HDV camcorders can feed live DV stream over IEEE 1394 interface to an external file-based recorder.

Video is stored either as native DIF bitstream or wrapped into an audio/video container such as AVI, QuickTime and MXF.
DV-DIF is the raw form of DV video. The files usually have extensions *.dv or *.dif.
DV-AVI is Microsoft's implementation of DV video file, which is wrapped into an AVI container. Two variants of wrapping are available: with Type 1 the multiplexed audio and video is saved into the video section of a single AVI file, with Type 2 video and audio are saved as separate streams in an AVI file (one video stream and one to four audio streams). This container is used primarily on Windows-based computers, though Sony offers two tapeless recorders, the HDD-based HVR-DR60[15] and the CompactFlash-based HVR-MRC1K, for use with DV/HDV camcorders that can record in DV-AVI format either making a file-based copy of the tape or bypassing tape recording altogether. Panasonic AVCHD camcorders use Type 2 DV-AVI for recording DV video onto Secure Digital memory card.
QuickTime-DV is DV video wrapped into QuickTime container. This container is used primarily on Apple computers.
MXF-DV wraps DV video into MXF container, which is presently used on P2-based camcorders (Panasonic) and on XDCAM/XDCAM EX camcorders (Sony).



source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DV