Most of the optical industry service providers are, not surprisingly, located on the West Coast. But there are regional houses as well. They will feed the information from my disc via software algorithms to what is called a burner, which guides the laser that brands a glass-topped DVD with the data pattern of dots that vary in terms of spacing and in terms of brightness and darkness. The spacing and variation of brightness and darkness of the dots are what makes the data readable to a computer or to a television set DVD player in the same way that the variety of shapes and spacing of these letters and words enables you to read this explanation. A single pit of an audio CD, shown in this scanning electron micrograph, is wider than a DVD pit.
Smaller pits make it possible to store more information on DVDs.
Then, a photograph is taken of this master DVD and an etching is made from that photograph. In turn, the etching is used to create a metal stamper. Let's say I want to make 1,000 DVD versions of my virtual reality artwork or 2 million DVD copies of my latest Hollywood flick. The replication house simply uses the metal stamper to imprint the pattern into the plastic coating of all those DVDs. What most people find at the local movie rental or video store is called a DVD-5.