Storage Space On DVDs
The games are stored on DVD, probably DVD-9 exclusively. These will be single-sided, double-layered DVDs with a capacity of 9 GB. Games seem to be written from the outside of the disk to the inside, which is very uncommon. Probably, the main reason is to prevent pirating. But it also allows the DVD drive to use a Constant Angular Velocity (CAV) to read most data on the outermost tracks in a much faster way.
The DVD player is a 5x CAV, which reduces the speed to 2x for data on the most inner tracks. For games, the drive will mostly be reading at 5x, or 6250 kb/s, which is great. The PS2 DVD player is a 4x CAV with an inner track speed of 1-2x. Apart from the connections, the player built by Thomson is a standard DVD-ROM which also reads audio CDs, just like video DVDs. But we'll come back to this later. The power cable is proprietary. The Xbox has a good data transfer rate. There is plenty of room for storage before the disks can be full. The console is not limiting for developers, especially if they want to include MPEG-2 movies, which would help in achieving beautiful cinematic effects.
