[MacDV] Newbie to DV looking for basic info on DVD's and more

[Aaron]

Let me begin by saying that hough I'm new to digital video, and fairly new to OS X, I'm far from new to the Mac, which has been my main system for about 14 years, or to BSD UNIX, which I used to do a lot with (including csh, sh, awk, sed, etc.) for more than a decade prior to that.

I'm looking first of all for info about DVD file structure, like:

What is the function of each file in the VIDEO_TS folder?

What is the AUDIO_TS folder for? (It seems to be empty on the DVD's I've looked at.)

How are titles, chapters, menus, region coding, encryption, etc. implemented, etc.?

I'm also interested in learning about various video codecs, what .avi format is, etc.

I'M ASKING FOR REFERENCES TO ONLINE MATERIALS OR DOCS THAT CAN BE EMAILED TO ME OFF-LIST. I'm not asking for anybody on this list to spend time writing up answers to the above, unless they have too much time on their hands |-O.

TIA,
Aaron

P.S. I'm running X.3.9 on a Dual G4 867 MDD with lots of hard disk space but temporarily only 512 MB RAM (until I get a bad DIMM replaced).