DVD-ROM

DVD-ROM (an acronym for Digital Versatile Disc Read-Only Memory) is an optical media format that was popular in the early 2000s, superseding the CD-ROM format.

Specifications
The standard data rate of a video DVD is 1,353 KB per second, about nine times that of a standard CD at 1x speed. DVDs can also be double-layered and/or double-sided to further increase capacity. Video DVDs may be region-coded to only play back in drives set to specific geographical regions.

History
Mac OS 8.1, released in January 1998, was the first classic Mac OS to include support for DVDs and the Universal Disk Format (UDF), superseding ISO 9660. Pioneer was the first company to manufacture DVD-ROM mechanisms for Macs.

A DVD-ROM drive was first introduced as a build-to-order option in the "Beige" Power Macintosh G3 in November 1997, which included a custom AV personality card with a dedicated MPEG-2 decoder chip. The first portable appearance was in the "Wallstreet" PowerBook G3 in May 1998. These were backwards compatible with CD-ROMs.

Apple introduced rewritable DVD-ROM drives under the "SuperDrive" brand with the 733 MHz Power Mac G4 in 2001. Apple released a firmware update in 2002 for older SuperDrives with Pioneer mechanisms to prevent recording problems when using high speed DVD-R media faster than 2x. Lower-cost "combo" drives that could read DVDs and write CD-Rs were heavily promoted for the iMac G3 through Apple's "Rip. Mix. Burn" campaign.

Deprecation
In 2008, Apple introduced a DVD±RW external USB SuperDrive for use with the MacBook Air, the first MacBook model to contain no optical drive mechanism. Though discs superseded DVDs in the consumer market, Apple did not adopt them and gradually phased out internal optical drives from its product line by 2012 with the following being the final releases:
 * MacBook, 2009 polycarbonate unibody model discontinued in 2012 and replaced by a thinner model with Retina display and only a solid-state drive in 2015.
 * Mac mini, 2010 model replaced in 2011 with the server version of the case with no optical drive slot.
 * iMac, 2011 aluminum models replaced in 2012 by slimmer models with no optical drive slot.
 * MacBook Pro, 2012 aluminum unibody models replaced by thinner models with Retina displays and solid-state drives in the same year.
 * Mac Pro (1st generation), 2012 model replaced by the smaller 2nd-generation Mac Pro in 2013, despite 3rd-party internal upgrades for the former.

Although Apple continues to offer its external USB SuperDrive as an option for Mac users, optical media is normally not supported by iPhones (and iPads).

iOS and iPadOS usage
iPhone and iPad users can browse the contents of CD-ROM and DVD-ROM media with the Files app if the following conditions are met:
 * The optical drive supports (and is set to) "Flash drive mode" or "TV mode" to make itself appear as a flash drive.
 * The drive is connected to its own power source, such as a powered USB hub, which is connected to the iPhone though a compatible adapter, such as a Lightning to USB Camera Adapter.
 * The disc is formatted as an or FAT32 volume. Audio CDs are not supported, but the contents of MP3 CDs can be browsed and played back. The contents of unencrypted video DVDs and the multimedia partition of s can be browsed, but videos not encoded in a supported MPEG format will require a 3rd-party app for playback.
 * HFS Plus discs cannot be browsed through a directly connected optical drive; they need to be mounted through a separate file server without encryption.