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PAL is a television broadcast standard used in the UK, it consists of 576 lines with 25 frames displayed per second. PAL was adopted by mostly european countries, though some countries such as France, adopted a slightly different version called SECAM.

NTSC is a television standard used the USA & Canada, it consists of 486 lines with 29.97 frames displayed per second. As the USA became popular for UK tourists, many consumers purchased NTSC camcorders or VHS tapes and could not play them in the UK. Manufacturers tweaked their players so that NTSC video tapes could be played on PAL TV's, but these were usually in poor quality.

DVD is an optical disk format, developed by Sony, Philips, Toshiba and Panasonic in the 90's. DVD's typically hold 4.7GB of data, approximately 2 hours of video. There are however, dual-layer DVD's that hold twice this amount, allowing upto 4 hours on a single disk. DVD's require most movies to be compressed in order to fit onto a disc, e.g. a 2 hour uncompressed movie could easily take up 40GB of data, and the only way to compress the movie down (and keep it the same length!) is to compress the movie, which in reality means that parts of every frame will need to be deleted. This sounds scary, however it's not as bad as it seems, if you imagine a scene such as a local football match, the difference between one frame and the next will be tiny, e.g. the sky and clouds will be the same, and so in theory all you need to record is the first frame, and then the differences from one frame to the next. This means that your choice of software you use to perform the compression is crucial and will make a dramatic difference to your final DVD quality.

MP4 is a digital video file that contains both video and audio. These files can be uploaded to cloud services such as Youtube and shared like any normal file. PC's and MAC's are normally bundled with software to play MP4 files, as are smart TV's, mobile phones and tablets.